Rex Stout

How Like a God

I

He had closed the door carefully, silently, behind him, and was in the dim hall with his foot on the first step of the familiar stairs. His left hand clutched the key to the apartment two flights up; his right hand, in the pocket of his overcoat, was closed around the butt of the revolver. Yes, here I am, he thought, and how absurd! He felt that if he had ever known anything in his life he knew that he would not go up the stairs, unlock the door, and pull the trigger of the revolver.

She would probably be sitting in the blue chair with many cushions, reading; so he had often found her.

His mind seemed suddenly clear and intolerably full, like a gigantic switchboard, with pegs in all the holes at once and every wire humming with an unwonted and monstrous burden. A vast intricacy of reasons, arguments, proofs — you are timid and vengeless, you are cautious and would be safe, you would be lost even if safe, you are futile, silly, evil, petty, absurd — he could not have spoken in all his years the limitless network of appeals, facts, memories, that darted at him and through him as his foot sought the third step. He heard them all...

You are timid and vengeless.

When you first saw that word you were in short pants and numberless words in the books you read were strange and thrilling. Many of them have long since been forgotten, many more have lost their savor; but this word has escaped both fates through the verses you wrote, using it in the first line of each stanza. Afraid of your father’s and mother’s good-natured criticism, you showed them only to Mrs. Davis, the Sunday-school teacher.

“Vengeless,” she said, “is not used for men and women, only for impersonal things.”

That was before she invited you to her house in the afternoon, but already she was smiling at you. You were mortified at having misused the word and tore the verses up.

That was timid, and you hated yourself for it without really knowing it. The most blatant and poignant timidity of those young Ohio days, though, was when, with the boys down on the lot below Elm Street of a summer afternoon, you would try to steal second base. Why did you ever try it? That was peculiarly not your dish. You always knew that and yet forever you tried it.

But during this period that vague and oppressive timidity had its usual seat at home, at the little house on Cooper Street. Probably its unknown focus was your sister Jane, for your father and mother were from first to last nebulous and ill-defined; they seemed to float around you; and your other sisters and brothers existed only as pestiferous facts. Larry was only five, and Margaret and Rose were being born or at least were scarcely out of the cradle.

With your father there was timidity too, but as you see now perfumed with contempt. The first dream you dreamt that was in touch with reality came when his business and his health lost step together and you were shocked and pleased to find yourself taken seriously as a member of the family.

“Bill, it’s up to you,” said your father, after your mother’s tears were dried and the younger children had been sent from the room. “Doc’s crazy. I’ll be at it again in a month. You’re nineteen, and big enough to handle two real drug stores, let alone that little hole in the wall. Nadel can do the prescriptions, and with all the afternoons and Saturdays you’ve had there...”

“He can’t do it,” said Jane, home for the summer from Northwestern. No, she was through then, and was teaching Latin in the high school. “It’s not your line, and anyway you’re too young and it’s not fair. I’m the one for it, and Dad will have to let me.”

Your father, curiously persistent, had Mr. Bishop come in and empowered you to sign checks, but no one was fooled by that empty symbol except your mother. You resented Jane bitterly as she competently kept patent medicine salesmen where they belonged while you mixed ice cream sodas and washed the glasses. It was then that Mrs. Davis went to Cleveland — ah, you still wonder, how much of that did Jane know? At all events, the whole world was dark. But your father, to the pleased but professionally discomfited surprise of Doc Whateley, pulled on his trousers again, “slightly disfigured but still in the ring” as the editor of the weekly Mail and Courier put it, and you went off for your second year at college at Westover.

That was the year that saw your legend created and made you a man of mark. You have never understood that episode; it was an astonishing contradiction of all timidities and inadequacies. What would have happened and where would you be now if Mrs. Moran had not done your washing and sent little Millicent to fetch it, and deliver it, twice a week? It was on her second or third visit that you became intensely aware of that pale child. It was indefinable and incredible; she was exactly ten, half your own age, pallid and scarcely alive, barely literate...

It must have been three months later that there happened to be a crowd in your room when she came. By then you were always making sure to have candy for her and to be always there when she arrived. That day you didn’t want to give her the candy with the other fellows present, and without even a glance she somehow let you know that she understood perfectly and sympathized.

When she had gone, Dick Carr, known as the Mule, made some remark, and you called him a name. The words wasn’t so bad, among friends, but your tone and attitude made the others gasp. The Mule, a seasoned halfback with nothing left to prove, was contemptuously surprised but undisturbed. Blindly you slapped him in the face.

There wasn’t a lot of excitement at first because it was taken for granted that the Mule would hit you once and then watch you bleed. The Mule certainly did hit you and you certainly bled; but long after you were logically extinct you still poked your bruised fists somehow at that gigantic shape, which must be annihilated before you went down to stay.

Kept in bed for a week, you were visited on the third day by the Mule himself; and not long after that you began to call him Dick instead of Mule, specifically at his own request, and thus became a man of note not only for having stood up to the Mule, but for being chosen as chief intimate of by far the richest man in the college.

All the spring semester you were inseparable, and when you went home in June you had promised to visit him during the summer. You had not been in Cleveland twenty-four hours before Mrs. Davis was entirely forgotten.

You fairly trembled with timidity that first afternoon in the garden when Dick introduced you to his sister Erma. Yes, you were always timid with Erma Carr. Partly perhaps it was the house, the servants, the motor cars, the glistening fountains, the clothes-closets lined with fragrant cedar? Perhaps, but Erma herself was enough.

By the end of the third week she asked you to marry her. Yes, she did, though she may have left the question marks to you. How many times you have wondered why Erma picked you out of all that were offered to her. It is amusing, your irritated concentration for more than twenty years on that trifling why.

You were driving with Erma along the lake shore the afternoon the telegram came, and when you returned it was waiting for you. When you got home, after midnight, your father was already dead. The question of the future arose, and with the perfection of tact Jane considered and felt the difficulties of your position.

“You’ve got to finish college. I can run the store for a couple of years; it’ll pay better than ever; you’ll see. Please, Bill, you’ve simply got to finish.”

You felt strongly that the counter of that drug store was the place for you, but the real truth is that you shrank from so formidable a task! Jane undertook it blithely, as one goes for a walk, and you packed up and went off for your third year.

Only one thing was then in your mind. You had accepted Jane’s generous offer, and you had bowed to the necessity of postponing the fulfillment of your own responsibilities, only because you were going to have a career as an author. That winter you did write two or three stories, and one day read one of them to Millicent, with whom you were by now enmeshed in a strange and peccant intimacy. When you had finished she said:

“I like it, but I’d rather...”

She was never verbal.

A leap of nearly two years to the next marked and fateful hesitation. You and Dick Carr were seated in a cafe on Sheriff Street in Cleveland, having just come in from a ball game.

“It would mean giving up my writing,” you protested for the hundredth time. You had two stories published in a Chicago magazine.

Dick went into details. “I’m going to be the works down on Pearl Street, but I want you along. If Dad hadn’t died when I was a kid I suppose I’d be going to Yale or taking up polo, but that’s out. I see where the real fight is, and I’m going to be in it.”

“You don’t have to fight so hard, do you, if you’re worth five million dollars?”

“You bet you do. Old Layton at the bank told me yesterday that the business had been going back for two years. He said young blood was needed. Right. I’ve got it. So have you. There’s going to be the devil to pay when I start firing those old birds down there about a year from Thursday. I want you in on it.

“The set up down there is that I own half the stock and Erma owns the other half. She’s more than willing to let me run the thing, provided her dividend checks come along. I’m going to be elected to the Board, and President of the company, at the meeting next week. What I want to do is get the whole thing right in my fist. I’m going to spend most of the winter in the plant at Carrton, and meanwhile you’ll be picking up all you can here at the office. You can start in at any figure you want within reason — say five thousand a year. Later you can have any damn title there is except mine.”

In his brusque and eager sentences Dick was already the Richard M. Carr who is now on forty directories. And already he was saying within reason — but that’s unfah, for his offer was generous and uncalculating. A hundred dollars a week was to you affluence.

It was like Erma not to have mentioned the garden episode again. At the time of her first trip to Europe she probably still Intended to take you eventually — possibly not. One of your longest sustained curiosities was to see that unlikely husband of hers, whom she claimed to have picked up in a fit of absent-mindedness on a beach somewhere east of Marseilles.

Then one December morning she unexpectedly opened the door of your private office in New York. By that time you were Treasurer of the Carr Corporation.

“Here I am,” she said. “Isn’t it silly? To come back from Provenge at this time of year! I must be getting old, I honestly think it was the thought of Christmas that brought me.”

It became apparent though that Erma had another motive. She had not been in New York a week before she told you that she was “fed up with that ’sieu-dame stuff,” and it may have been as simple as that, but that did not explain why she again selected you. By that time you had become much more articulate than on the day of the famous garden scene in Cleveland, and on the morning that she made the announcement, you put it up to her squarely.

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” she replied brightly. “Do you mean that you feel yourself unworthy of me?”

To end the argument she took things into her own hands, and the following autumn there was an effective climax to what the newspapers called a youthful romance. This whole thing had been consummated without your having reached a decision of any kind.

This is scarcely the picture of a man who would execute a desperate enterprise. What are you doing, making another gesture in a last effort to impress yourself? The woman up there doesn’t believe in it. Last night she said:

“I’m afraid well enough. But not that you’ll hurt me that way. Call it contempt, it doesn’t matter what you call it. We’ve been fitted for what we’ve done together, but I’ve been me and you’ve been you. There’s nothing changed now if you don’t bring words into it. You know I have always lied to you and always will. It isn’t the truth you look for in me.”

II

Not halfway up the first flight, he stopped and listened. That was the basement street door closing. Mrs. Jordan putting out the milk bottles. He almost called to her. She would have called back, what d’ye want, in a tone that advised him to want as little as possible.

His right hand left his overcoat pocket and took hold of the rail; when it left the handle of the revolver it felt as if it were letting go of something sticky and very warm. The wires hummed and buzzed in his head.

Just what is it you expect to accomplish? You, who have all your life been tied to your sister’s apron strings. The fact is, Jane has always been the woman for you; all the security and peace you have ever known.

You’ve never thanked her for it; it has always been futile. The time you went home from Cleveland for your things, having definitely agreed with Dick, Jane listened quietly to your grandiose plans along with the rest of the family.

The following morning Jane came into your room while you were packing.

“Bill, I’m afraid you’re being driven into this by your feeling that you’ve got to do something for the family. You shouldn’t. The store’s doing better than ever and the way this town’s growing we can sell it for a lot of money in a few years. Meanwhile it can keep all of us nicely. What if you don’t make much by your writing for two or three years?”

Futile. In your pocket was the five hundred dollars Dick had advanced, more than you had ever seen before.

She tried again four years later, when the store was sold and you went down to help take the sucker off the hook, as Jane put it in her letter. In reality there was nothing for you to do but sign papers; Jane had made an impeccable deal.

“I’m going to New York and take Rose and Margaret along. Mother wants to stay here with Aunt Cora. Thanks to your generosity Larry can go to college next month without anything to worry about.”

As neat as that. And you longed inexpressibly to say: “Take me to New York with you. Let’s be together. I’ll write of I’ll get a job or I’ll do anything. Maybe some day you will be proud of me.” But you did not.

Even more to the point by way of futility have been your own efforts at Larry, who bounded out of the West into New York one day like a calf arrogantly bumping its mother for a meal.

Larry was pleasantly impressed but not at all overawed by your elaborate office. “Have you decided where I’m to start blowing up the buildings?” he laughed.

He was leaving it all to you, and you were thrilled by this, unaware that it was only because to his youthful eagerness and ardor details were unimportant. Also it has already been decided. Dick had been extremely decent about it.

He spent six months in the plant in Ohio, six more in the Michigan ore mines, some few weeks in New York. He proved himself. Young as he was he rose in importance by his own ability and force, but during all those months that became years you felt a vague uneasiness about him.

The explosion came at a difficult moment, and unexpectedly. Only the previous week Larry had won new laurels by bringing to a successful close the Cumberland bridge negotiations, down in Maryland. The difficulty though had come through Erma, whose pretty teeth had shown themselves for the first time the night before in a most inelegant snarl. When, immediately after you and he had been seated at the usual corner table in the Manufacturers’ Club, he announced that he was going to leave the Carr Corporation, you were at first merely irritated.

“Of course you don’t mean it. What’s the joke?”

“There’s no joke. I’m going to chuck it. This is not the life for me.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a good deal saved, thanks to your and Dick’s generosity, and I may buy the Martin place out in Idaho where I went last summer. He’ll sell cheap.”

“Going to raise cattle?”

“Perhaps. Or get a job in the forest service. I don’t know.”

Evidently he had been considering it for some time.

That evening you went to see Jane, at the house on Tenth Street where you expected to find the usual crowd. You intended to take Jane off somewhere and persuade her to bring Larry to his senses. But when you arrived the rooms on the ground floor were dark, and proceeding brusquely upstairs, you found Jane and Larry alone in Jane’s room.

“I suppose Larry’s told you of his contemplated renascence,” you said to Jane.

“Yes.”

“We’ve just been talking about it,” Larry said. “Jane thinks it’s all right.”

Jane put her hand on yours. “You run away, Larry,” she said, “and let Bill and me talk. Please. Go on.”

He went, observing that he would see you in the morning at the office. “Meanwhile that you’ll smooth out my childish irritation,” you observed.

“Yes,” she agreed unexpectedly, pressing your hand. “It’s a darned shame. This was bound to hurt you. I told Larry so the first time he spoke to me about it.”

“So it’s been cooking for a long while. I like the picture of you and Larry calculating the chances of my eventual recovery.”

There was no reply. You looked up, and saw tears in Jane’s eyes.

“You’re the only person I’ve ever cried about,” she said finally. “I seem to feel more touched by what things mean for you than by what they mean even for myself, let alone anybody else.”

A month later Larry was on his way West. If Jane had been futile with you, how much more futile had you been with him!

You could dance around in that cage forever. Futility begins where? With you, though, it has almost certainly arrived by the time you went to the home of Mrs. Davis. You were fifteen, seventeen, no matter.

One winter Monday afternoon found you on her porch with an umbrella which she had left on some previous day at old Mrs. Poole’s on the other side of town. She herself opened the door.

“How do you do, William. Thank you so much.” Then, as you flushed and twirled your cap, “Won’t you come in a little while? Mother is spending the week in Chicago and my husband won’t be home for hours.”

You had several times previously crossed the moat of the lawn and advanced as far as the pure white portal, but never before inside the castle itself.

“We can sit here on the couch and go over next Sunday’s lesson.” She was probably watching your face, for she added almost at once, “Or would you rather just talk?”

You blurted out, “just talk,” and sat down on the edge of the couch beside her.

The second time you went, invited without the excuse of an errand, she told you all about her husband. It seemed that although he was a fine man, he had more or less deceived her into marriage by concealing from her girlish ignorance some of its more difficult and profound aspects.

You nodded, trembling; no word would come.

“Sit down by me. Here, put your head in my lap, like that. Don’t you like to be near me and put your head in my lap? You are a very dear boy, only you are nearly a man. Why not pretend you are a man, and kiss me?”

You discovered then that the girls at school knew very little about kissing, and you yourself, as a matter of fact, knew less.

Granting all your neat formula of futility, it is strange that you were never curious as to the nature and depth of Mrs. Davis’s attachment to you. Was it for her an episode among a hundred, or was it all that her avowals declared?

III

What if Mrs. Jordan had heard him come in? Or even seen him? She might very well have been standing by the grill, her hands full of milk bottles, when he went up the stoop. His hand still on the rail, he half turned about there on the stairs, undecided. Timid, futile, vengeless, actionless...

There has not been one major experience in your life in which you were the aggressor. The Davis affair was her doing. It was so again with Lucy Crofts. And each crisis in your economic and business life, which means the Carr Corporation, has been so little guided by you that you might as well have been at home asleep. Throughout the first months, and even years, you served as an information channel between Dick and the intricate parts of the vast organism he was getting into his fist. For that function you were well-fitted and you fulfilled it excellently.

Dick would get in from the Carrton plant usually on Friday evening, late, and you and he would go to the café on Sheriff Street, because he said he could relax there more easily than at home.

Dick, having ordered a three-inch steak, would gulp a stein of beer without stopping, lick the foam from his lips, settle back in the big leather chair and sigh contentedly. By the time the steak arrived you would be reading from sheets of memoranda neatly arranged on the table before you.

Meanwhile, the social side of life he entirely ignored, refusing even to appear at Erma’s Sunday teas, and you were pulled along with him.

“You’ll both die of ingrown dispositions,” Erma would observe indifferently. “Damon and Pythias, victims of the Iron Age.”

“Go on and deposit your dividend checks,” Dick would reply with equal indifference.

Gradually, after Dick’s return to Cleveland, you began to find time on your hands. One evening you looked through the little red memorandum book and found Mrs. Davis’s Cleveland address, placed there six years before from the only letter you had ever received from her.

The next afternoon you telephoned, and there she was. You were made aware that you were more deeply interested than you had suspected by the excitement.

Would she — that is — how about going out to dinner?

“Well, you see, I’m afraid I can’t. There are so many things always to do, and I always eat dinner at home with my husband...”

Idiotically, you asked after Mr. Davis’s health.

You perhaps remember so vividly because it was so characteristic of your absurdity, your futility. There have been other examples, only more extended, like the winter devoted so completely to Lucy Crofts, or like the summer, only four years ago, which you and Erma spent at Larry’s ranch.

It was Erma’s idea, suggested by a rodeo she saw in New York, and impelled of course by her constant restlessness. She and Larry seemed to hit it off; she was given the best horse on the place, and usually she was out riding the range with him. At times you suspected that he was being a bit harried, but you had been chronically suspicious of Erma for so long a period that this was merely the continuation of a state of mind.

One evening at the dinner table you noticed that Larry and Erma scarcely spoke to each other. All you got out of it was a faint amusement for you had long since grown accustomed to Erma’s talent for creating tensions with almost anyone when she was in certain moods.

Sometime in the dead of night you awoke out of a dream, suddenly aware that something was wrong. You kicked out a foot. Erma wasn’t there. You heard a noise somewhere, a faint mumbling trickling through the thin bare walls. You got out of bed and groped your way to the door and softly opened it.

The mumbling instantly became voices, loud enough to be recognized. You tiptoed in your bare feet down the narrow hall to the door of Larry’s room.

“You’re a little fool,” Larry was saying. “Can’t you take a hint?”

Then Erma, somewhat louder and much more calmly.

“Come, Larry, you’re the fool. Why do you pretend I’m not attractive to you? Such conceit. Don’t you know that I made you kiss me the first time I decided it was worth the trouble?”

“The first and the last. You’ve no sense of decency, Erma. Now go.”

“It would be nicer to kiss me now — like this.”

You heard a quick movement, and another. Larry’s voice came, “I tell you to go, I mean it,” and immediately you heard something that you would have given a great deal to see — a loud sharp slap, the smack of a heavy open palm.

You tiptoed swiftly back down the hall. What if it were Erma up there now in that room; imagine yourself here on these stairs, equipped, desperate, with death in your heart! Bah, you couldn’t even slap her as Larry did that night.

IV

He stood there, trying to force his brain to consider and decide the instant problem, whether to call to Mrs. Jordan. He was completely confused. If he called to her, that settled it; but if he did not call to her, how was he to know whether she had heard him come in, or seen him?

He stood there without moving a muscle, still less than halfway up the first flight, and all at once he heard a voice from a great distance calling to him, well, aren’t you coming up?

You fool, he told himself...

You fool, to stand here on the edge of hell.

So you did stop on the stairs, though, that night in Cleveland many years ago, and so did Lucy Crofts call down to you as you stood hesitating.

“Well, aren’t you coming up?”

At that time you would rather hear Lucy’s voice than any other sound in the world.

You decided, after the fiasco of your call to Mrs. Davis that the thing to do was to find a nice Cleveland girl and take her for a mistress. You went over your scanty list of friends and acquaintances; there was no one.

Of a late afternoon, as you walked from the office in Pearl Street to the Jayhawker Club, the sidewalks were filled with girls. Working girls, high-school girls, fur-coated girls. You knew that three out of five of these girls could be picked up, for Dick had said so.

The easiest way would be with the car. You began to leave the office a little early, get the car and drive around the Square, up and down Euclid Avenue, through the narrow crowded crosstown streets. You had often seen it done; one drove slowly, against the curb, and at just the right moment, one said in a low tone, rapidly, but clearly, “Hello, want to ride?”

But you never did actually pronounce those words.

Late one rainy afternoon in April, you were driving the car slowly along Cedar Avenue, aimlessly aware of the wet glistening pavements in the gathering dusk, the clanging street cars, the forest of bobbing umbrellas on the sidewalk at your right. Suddenly there was a sharp cry ahead, and other shouts of alarm as you automatically jammed your foot on the brake. You jumped out. Almost under your front wheels a girl was being helped to her feet. In an instant you were there beside her, helping another man hold her up.

“It’s my fault,” the girl was saying. “I’m not hurt. I stepped right in front of the car. Where’s my music?”

A search disclosed a black leather roll lying in a puddle of water against the curb. You picked it up and handed it to her.

“I’m terribly sorry,” you said. “That’s the first time I ever hit anybody.”

“I don’t think you really hit me, I think I just slipped. Goodness, I’m soaked too. I’d better get a cab.”

“I’d be glad to take you if you’ll let me,” you offered hurriedly.

She looked at your face, and down at her dress. “I suppose I’ll have to go back home. It’s quite a distance.”

“I haven’t a thing to do,” you assured her. “I have all the time there is. I was just fooling around watching the rain.”

She gave you a quick glance and sank back into a silence which was scarcely broken during the long ride. You wanted to talk but were afraid of making a false step. She was quite young, you guessed not over eighteen, and very pretty.

Finally you drew up at the curb in front of a large house set behind a wide lawn. It was still raining.

“My name is Will Sidney,” you said abruptly. “I’m the assistant treasurer of the Carr Corporation. I wonder if you would care to go to the theater with me sometime?”

She looked directly at you and said promptly and simply: “I’d like to very much.” Suddenly she smiled. “You know I’ve been arguing with myself the last ten minutes whether you’d say something like that to me.”

“How did it come out?”

“I didn’t decide, only I thought you might. I really would like to, only it wouldn’t be easy, because I live here with my uncle and aunt and they are very strict with me.”

“You could tell them we met somewhere.”

She frowned. “I don’t know. I could tell them something.”

It was arranged. You wrote down her name, Lucy Crofts, and the telephone number, and the name of her uncle, Thomas M. Barnes. Next day, at the lunch hour, you went to the Hollenden and got tickets for a play the following week; but you waited four days before telephoning her, as agreed.

When she took off her hat at the theater, and patted her hair and looked around at the audience, you realized that she was even better-looking that you had thought, and a little nearer maturity. But on the whole the evening was a disappointment. She didn’t care to go to supper afterwards, and driving home through the spring night she talked mostly of her father’s farm near Dayton.

A day or two later, receiving through Dick an invitation to a dance at the Hollenden, you phoned Lucy and asked her to go. That was more like it. She danced well, and so did you; and Dick danced with her once and afterwards observed to you:

“If she needs her shoes shined or anything and you’re too busy let me know.”

On the way home Lucy said: “I had a wonderful time. This is the latest I’ve ever been out. Of course I’m only nineteen. Mr. Carr dances very well, but not as well as you. You dance much better than I do.”

You took her to the theater again, several times, and to another dance or two. On one of those occasions you were invited by Mrs. Barnes to dine with them. You were no longer inventing fancies about her or imagining easy triumphs; with her the pose of a triumph had become absurd.

Towards the end of May Lucy began to talk of going home for the summer. In two weeks, she said, her music teacher would leave for Europe, and she was going home to the farm to remain until he returned in the fall. Or perhaps she would then go to New York; she supposed that was really the best thing to do, if her father could be persuaded.

“I’ve heard of a place down south of here,” you said. “Down near Cuyahoga Falls. A deep canyon, with walls two hundred feet high, quite wild. Let’s go down there next Sunday. We can drive it in two hours, easy.”

Her aunt and uncle didn’t like the idea, but they knew that a whole generation was against them, and early Sunday morning saw you off with a huge lunch basket and a thermos bottle of coffee. But it rained most of the day, and early in the afternoon you surrendered and returned to a roadhouse just outside the city, wet and chilled and hungry. Lucy didn’t seem to mind it, but you were unduly miserable, and when she asked you what was the matter you observed gloomily that it was only a little more than a week before she would be gone and you would be alone.

“Alone!” she exclaimed. “You have more friends than I ever heard of.”

“I haven’t a real friend, anywhere, except you.”

She was silent.

“Where are you going this summer?” she asked suddenly. “Would you care to come down to our place?”

This was surprising; it hadn’t occurred to you even in your numerous fancies; but now that she said it, it was so natural and obvious that it almost seemed as if you had deliberately planned it.

“But I couldn’t,” you protested. “Your folks never heard of me.”

“Oh, I’ve told them all about you. There won’t be anyone there except Father and Mother. They’d love to have you.”

You knew that of course you were going. It meant nothing to you but that you would be with Lucy, which was enough. You took her in your arms and kissed her.

“That’s the first time anyone has ever kissed me,” she said quietly.

“Not really?”

“Of course.” Her grave grey eyes shone a little humorously. “I guess it’s the first time anyone ever wanted to.”

When you told Dick you would like to take a month away from the office he was completely indifferent to your intentions until their specific probabilities amused him.

Dick’s eyes opened wide. “The hell she did! Why you old Romeo. You’d better watch out, Bill. She’s the kind that gets chronic.”

“Maybe she already is. I’ve told her I’ll come.”

“You’ll go all right. I’m not so sure I wouldn’t like to go there myself, if I were asked but I’d get sick of it in a week.”

He grinned, and went on: “You know, she turned me down flat. Out at the Hampton Club, about a month ago, you remember, you brought her of course, I asked her to go to dinner and a show, and she said flatly she just didn’t want to. She handed the same package to Charlie Harper.”

So Dick had tried to take her away. And that big bum Harper... well, that was all right. Nor was there any code which warranted the resentment you felt against Dick, but you felt it.

“It will be all right then for the first of July?” you said.

“God bless you. If you ask me I think you’re hooked. Not that she’d insist on your marrying her. That’s just the way it works.”

That evening, the eve of her departure, you told Lucy you would come for the entire month of July.

V

He was still conscious of an irritation at Mrs. Jordan’s persistent noises below, but he found that he had mounted another step, and another. His eyes were now level with the first landing, one flight up, the floor where the two art students lived. Another step, and he could see the grey plaster figure in the niche in the curved wall, beside the flimsy little electric lamp that always got knocked off when he passed it with his overcoat flapping.

He looked at it, really looked at it, as if he had never seen it before, and yet he did not now see it. His ears acutely registered the movements of Mrs. Jordan, and yet he did not hear them. He did hear himself, in his brain somewhere. Do you realize that you are going on, going ahead? Do you realize that you don’t at all know what you are doing?

You have felt like this before, less acutely, that day for instance you ate dinner at the club with your son more than two years ago. Paul, his name is. You called him Paul.

That didn’t seem real either. Nor did that note, on a square piece of blue paper, which you found on your office desk one morning in the pile of personal mail.

“Dear Mr. Sidney,” it said, “if you can spare me an hour, some day this week, I would like very much to ask you about something. It was a long time ago, but I believe you will remember my name. Sincerely, Emily Davis.”

At the top was an address and telephone number.

When she was shown into your office, you were genuinely shocked. She was an old woman now. As she looked at you pleasantly, you could see anxious years in her eyes, and a present anxiety too.

“Little Will Sidney,” she smiled. “Now that I see you, I know I was foolish to take so long to make up my mind.”

You escorted her to the big leather seat in the corner, and took a chair in front of her. She seemed to know a good deal about you, the year you had come to New York, the date of your marriage with Erma, the fact of your having no children. She told you, briefly but completely, of her own journey through the many days. Mr. Davis had practiced law in Cleveland, never very successfully, for seven years, then they had moved to Chicago. There it was even worse, he never squeezed more than a scanty living out of it; and there was nothing but a modest insurance payment for her and her little son when one winter he took pneumonia and died. Mrs. Davis managed to get a position as a teacher in the Chicago public schools, which she still held; she was in New York only for a visit, having come, it appeared, expressly to see you. She had somehow kept her son Paul fed and clothed to the end of high school, and he had worked his way through the University of Chicago.

“It’s Paul really I came to see you about. He graduated from the university two years ago; he’s twenty-four now. He’s a good boy and I thought you might help.”

“Where is he?”

“In New York. He has a job now and then, but he thinks he wants to be a sculptor. He studied in Chicago a while and won a prize; now he works at it so hard, he can’t keep a job very long. What he wants more than anything else is to go abroad for two or three years.”

You considered.

“If he has real talent he certainly should be encouraged,” you agreed judiciously. “I might speak to Dick — Mr. Carr — about it.”

“I thought you might do it yourself,” she said. “You see, you’re his father.”

You stared at her.

“I wasn’t going to tell you,” she went on, “but after all, why shouldn’t I? Jim’s dead, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. He was born a few months after we got to Cleveland. That was really why we went away.”

You stammered, “Can you — that is — I don’t see how you can know—”

“I know well enough.”

“What does he look like?”

“Not much like anyone.” She smiled. “You’ll just have to take my word for it; it’s funny, it never occurred to me that you might doubt it.”

“Well.” You got up from your chair.

You walked to the window and looked down into the street. “Of course he doesn’t know?”

“Good heavens no! There’s no reason why he should.”

“None at all,” you reassured her. “It was a foolish question. Of course he mustn’t know. As for helping him — yes, of course. I’d like—” You hesitated. “I’d like to see him,” you said.

She agreed at once. Two days later you met him in the lobby of your club. You knew him at once, and hastened over and extended your hand.

“Mr. Davis? I’m Mr. Sidney.”

Later, seated in the dining-room with soup in front of you, you examined him critically. He was rather poorly dressed; his hands were big and strong and not too clean, and his coat-sleeves were too short. His hair and eyes were dark. You thought that he resembled you a little, particularly in structure.

“Your mother tells me you would like to study abroad,” you observed.

“Yes, sir. I would like to. It’s almost essential.”

“Are there better teachers over there than in New York?”

He explained that it wasn’t so mud a matter of teachers, it was the stimulation, the atmosphere, the tradition, the opportunity to see the great works of the masters. He talked of all this at length, in a sensible and straightforward manner.

“I suppose,” you observed, “you could make out over there on three thousand a year.”

“Less than that,” he replied quickly, “surely much less. I should say two thousand would be ample. That’s forty dollars a week.” Then he added, a little awkwardly, “Of course, if there really is a chance of your helping me out, you would want to find out if I’m likely to deserve it. I haven’t much stuff, a few figures and a group or two, but if you could come down some day and look at them...”

It wasn’t much of a studio — a small room with an alcove on the top floor of an old house in one of those obscure streets west of Seventh Avenue, below Fourteenth. Apparently he both worked and slept there, and perhaps ate too. Clay and plaster figures were scattered about; there were two marble groups, one, quite large, of workmen lifting a beam. It seemed to you very big and impressive.

“I worked nearly two years on that,” Paul said, “and it’s all wrong. See, look here.”

You listened attentively and nodded your head from time to time. After he had finished talking about it you still thought the group big and smooth and impressive. He brought out some portfolios.

“By the way,” he said suddenly, “I almost forgot. Here’s a letter from Mother.”

You opened and read it. She thanked you, and said she knew she need never worry about her son, and bade you goodbye.

You looked at him in surprise. “Where is she? She hasn’t gone?”

He nodded. “Back to Chicago. Yesterday. You see she only had a week off.”

He opened one of the portfolios and began turning over the sketches, pointing and explaining.

He finished with the portfolios and stood in front of you.

“Mother suggested something before she left,” he said doubtfully, “but I don’t know whether you’d care about it. She thought I ought to stay on a month or two and do a bust of you. You have a fine head and a strong face, not at all ordinary. Quite interesting.”

The sittings began the following Monday.

You told no one about Paul, not even Jane, though you were at that time seeing more of her than you had for years, on account of the recent illness and death of your mother, the journey to the funeral in Ohio, and Margaret’s difficulties.

You and Jane and Margaret and Rose had gone out on the same train, and Larry came from Idaho, his first trip east since his departure, five years before. Everything was done before you arrived, nothing was left but the dismal role of polite mourner.

So on the evening after the funeral you all left for New York. You had engaged a drawing-room for the three girls and a compartment for yourself and Larry, who, having got as far east as Ohio, had been persuaded by Jane to come on to New York for a visit.

“What’s up between Rose and Margaret?” asked Larry. “They act as if they’d like to bite chunks out of each other.”

“They would,” you replied. “There’s a hell of a row on. Margaret’s going to be a corespondent and Rose doesn’t want her to.”

Larry, stooping to get a magazine from his bag, straightened up to stare at you.

“Don’t ask me,” you went on hastily. “I really don’t know an awful lot about it, but we’re both due to find out. Jane asked me to come back, and bring you, as soon as we got settled.”

Your ring at the door of the drawingroom, and your entrance in response to Jane’s summons, evidently interrupted Rose in the middle of a speech. Margaret, on one of the cross-seats, made room for Larry beside her, and then turned her eyes again on Rose.

“Say it again, so the head of the family can hear you,” she drawled with a glance at you. She turned to Larry. “I don’t really know you, though you’re my brother, but you look like a nice man.”

“Count me out,” said Larry so hastily that everybody laughed.

“As far as that’s concerned, me, too,” you put in. “There’s no occasion to dig at me, Margaret. I’m the head of nobody’s family. We came back because Jane asked us to.”

“Bill may not be the head of the family,” said Jane, “but he’s got a better head than any of us.”

“Thanks,” you said. “I don’t know what it’s all about anyway, except that somebody’s wife is going to get a divorce by proving that Margaret stole her husband, and Rose is sore, because if her sister’s name is dragged in the mire, she may have trouble marrying a noble scion of the wholesale leather trade.”

This produced a double explosion. Rose shouted above the train’s roar that her fiancé wasn’t a businessman at all, but that he was of an old and fastidious family; while Margaret declared that she had stolen nobody’s husband, and that he wasn’t just somebody. Dr. Oehmsen was an internationally known scientist and a great man.

“Sure,” agreed Rose, “that’s why it’s such a mess. What the tabloids won’t do!”

“They make the mire, we don’t,” returned Margaret.

“They put you in it, and me too,” Rose appealed to all of you. “I’m not asking her to give up her great man. Though if you could see him...”

Margaret exploded, “You’re a selfish outrageous little beast!” and began to cry.

You marvelled at the turmoil and fury. In a way you envied them. Do you envy them now? Ah, that would be more than tolerable now, that would be blessed, to be again frozen with indifference! What will Rose and her fastidious family say when they hear of this? What will Margaret and Larry? What if they were all here now, what if they suddenly appeared on the stairs around you?

VI

He stopped, and again stood still, and his lips moved as though he were talking to the little parchment-shaded lamp, and pronouncing Jane’s name.

He turned and looked behind him, downstairs, and started at sight of a dark form against the wall in the hall below, but saw at once that it was the side of the high black frame of the mirror and coat rack. He had avoided looking into the mirror as he passed, and he wished now that he hadn’t; he wanted to know what his face looked like; in the street he had felt that people were staring at him.

There were still sounds of Mrs. Jordan in the basement, but now he thought he heard another noise, above, and he turned quickly to look at the door facing the first landing. It was closed; there was no light under it. Those girls, he reflected, were always out at night. That was one of the things he had counted on.

You counted on, a bitter voice said to him; yes, you might count on that; you might count on anything except yourself...

You have always betrayed yourself, most miserably at those moments when you most needed the kind of fortitude that can neither be borrowed nor simulated. Yet it was not fear, exactly; more an avoidance and a denial. Certainly you weren’t afraid of Lucy, nor were you afraid of the delights she gave and promised.

You felt pretty sure you were going to marry Lucy, that day while the train roared its way through the flat fields towards Dayton, where she was to meet you. She had left Cleveland twelve days before, and they had been empty days for you.

She, alone, met you at the Dayton station, and in a little dark blue roadster drove you west, into the setting sun, some fifteen miles from the city. You were surprised at the extent of the farmhouse and buildings; you knew that Lucy’s father, publisher and editor of a newspaper somewhere, had at middle age suddenly given it up and purchased a farm and begun raising thoroughbred stock, but you hadn’t expected to see anything so elaborate.

Of all the people you have known, you have understood Lucy’s father and mother least. They were obviously healthy and happy, on excellent terms with life, yet they gave the impression of having no contact with it. Their attitude towards Lucy had none of that rubbing intimacy which is always associated with parenthood. She might have been a privileged summer boarder. You were courteously made welcome; beyond that you were strictly Lucy’s business, it seemed no affair of theirs.

You rode a great deal, you on her little mare Babe, Lucy on one of the more unmanageable beasts from the general stables; you played tennis, read, picked berries, went fishing once or twice. The fishing was no good.

“I don’t understand it,” said Lucy. “Just last summer it was full of sunfish as big as your hand. This is all on our land, and no one ever comes here.”

You sat beside her on the bank, idly throwing pebbles into the pool. “Does your father own clear down to here?”

She nodded. After a silence she said:

“I read a book last summer that said that nobody ought to own any land.”

“Do you believe that?”

“I don’t know,” she frowned. “I don’t see what right anybody has to tell us what we ought to do.”

“I’ve got a right to tell you oughtn’t to pull my hair, haven’t I?”

“You have not. You only have a right to pull mine back — if you can.”

Quickly she reached down and grabbed a handful of your thick brown hair and gave it a sharp tug. You yelled and seized her wrist, and straightened up, and struggled and clinched. You ended sitting on top of her, holding her down, dipping your hand into the water and trickling it onto her face from the ends of your fingers, and demanding surrender.

“I like that, it’s nice and cool,” she said, lying quietly; but for some reason you got up and moved a little off and sat down again on the grass. She too sat up and patted at her hair and pulled her dress down, and then got on her knees and dabbled in the water with her hands.

There followed a couple of rainy days; you drove into Dayton and back, and in the evening you tried a game of chess with Mr. Crofts but found him much too good for you.

A few days later, on the last day of July, Lucy drove you to Dayton to catch the afternoon train for Cleveland. Her father came along, having some errands in town. You were expected back at the office the following morning.

Nothing had happened, and you couldn’t understand it. What did you want, what were you waiting for? You said to yourself that Lucy was interested in her music, that what she wanted was a career, but you knew that was twaddle.

Was Lucy in love with you? Yes. No. What would you say if you asked her, do you love me? Probably that she didn’t know, and then if you asked her to marry you she would say at once, yes, of course I will. You decided you would write and ask her, and have it done.

At the office next day Dick’s secretary entered and handed you a letter.

“I’ve attended to most of Mr. Carr’s private mail,” she said, “but there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about this. I’ve sent a wire to Mr. Carr, but he may not get it for a week.”

The letter was from Erma, mailed in Vienna. She said she was leaving for America, and after spending a week in New York would continue to Cleveland and probably spend the fall and winter there. Would Dick, like a good brother, give the necessary orders to have the house got in readiness?

The next morning there was a telegram, saying that she would arrive on Thursday. You immediately drove out to Wooton Avenue to see that your instructions of the day before were being executed.

One of your most vivid memories of Erma from the early days is that August morning in the dingy old Cleveland railroad station. She came down the board platform like a fairy princess in lace and flowers borne on a breeze, surrounded by porters loaded with bags and parcels.

“Bill — how nice of you!”

You explained that Dick was out of town. She kissed you on the cheek, and you felt yourself blushing.

“I’ve got to kiss someone,” she declared, “do you mind? Anyway, you look so nice you should be kissed. I think Americans are better-shaved than Europeans, they always look a bit stubby.”

She was gorgeous, distracting, overwhelming. You rode out to the house with her and spent some time explaining the arrangements you had made, regretting that the time had been too short to see them all carried out, and finally you stayed and lunched with her before returning to the office.

Late one afternoon, about a week after Erma’s return, called to the telephone, you heard her voice. It was raining, she was lonely, she needed intelligent conversation, would you come out for a tête-à-tête dinner?

You would.

It is difficult to recapture the impression that Erma made upon you then. Certainly you were flattered by any attention she gave you; just as certainly you were not in love with her. You always tell yourself that, with Mrs. Davis, with Millicent, with Lucy — then you have never been in love? No, has anyone?

She was very nice to you that evening; she can be nicer than anyone else when she wants to. The dinner was perfect, and you both drank enough wine — just enough. Afterward you sat in the little room beyond the library and talked, and listened, and admired Erma’s fine white arms and graceful neck and her pretty fluttering nervous gestures, when all at once she stopped and looked at you and said:

“There’s one thing I’ve admired you for a lot. Do you remember that we were once engaged to be married?”

It was without warning, but you managed a smile.

“No,” you said, “were we?”

“And you’ve never even told Dick, at least I don’t suppose you have—”

“I haven’t.”

She kissed her finger and touched your lips with it.

“You’re a darling. I hate explanations. Of course, it may be that you were glad to be out of it.”

“Unspeakably. I was going to be a great writer and was afraid it would take my mind off my work.”

She pretended to shiver a little. “Ugh. Don’t. That sounds as if it were decades ago. Good heavens you’re only twenty-five, and I’m twenty-seven. We were both too young.”

“Twenty-six next month.”

“Yes? We’ll have a party and make everybody bring you a present.”

After that you received many invitations from Erma — teas, dinners, dances — and you accepted most of them, but you were careful; you had been scorched once by that tricky flame and were shy of it. Then one afternoon she telephoned to ask you to come to dinner, early; she emphasized it, early; and when you arrived and had been shown into the library she entered almost at once and explained:

“Dick’s coming. He phoned and especially wanted to come, so I suppose he intends to talk about business. I regard you as my business adviser, and I confess I’m a little overpowered by darling Dick’s Napoleonic dash, so I want you to be here too.”

You were aghast.

“Good god, Erma, I can’t do it. Don’t you see how impertinent and impudent it would seem to him?”

Her eyes tightened a little; that was the first time you saw them do it.

“Impudent!” she exclaimed. Then she laughed. “I don’t need you to withstand Napoleon, Bill dear; it won’t be necessary and if it is I’ll attend to it. But I’m ignorant, and you know things. Really I insist.”

When Dick arrived a little later he didn’t bother to conceal his surprise and annoyance at seeing you. Nor did he trouble to lower his voice when he said to Erma:

“I thought you said you’d be alone.”

“I’d forgotten about Bill,” she said carelessly. “He often comes out to relieve my loneliness. If it’s really so confidential—”

No, Dick said, it didn’t matter.

It was the first time the three of you had been alone together since the summer of your second visit. At dinner you talked of that, and of Dick’s fishing trip, and of other inconsequential things. You were relieved that Dick had speedily forgotten his annoyance at your presence.

“I’m surprised that you can get Bill out to this end of town so often,” he said to Erma. “Who does he leave to guard his shepherdess? Not that she needs it.”

Erma glanced at him, and at you. “Have you got a shepherdess?”

“What, haven’t you met her?” asked Dick. “I don’t know where he found her, but he brought her to a couple of dances last spring, and she darned near started a riot.” He turned to you. “You haven’t fried and eaten her?”

You explained that Lucy had remained at the farm for the rest of the summer and wouldn’t return to Cleveland for another week or so.

“I thought you told me all your secrets,” said Erma reproachfully, “and here you’ve got a beautiful shepherdess that I never even heard of.”

“It’s no secret,” you said shortly, “and I haven’t got her.”

“The hell you haven’t,” said Dick.

After dinner you wanted to leave and were busy devising a suitable excuse, when you caught a glance from Erma which said plainly that she read your intention and that you might as well discard it. Dick moved to a chair next to Erma and began telling her his errand.

The recent death of old Meynell, the lawyer, he explained, made necessary a new arrangement regarding Erma’s stock. “The stock should be represented at the next annual stockholders’ meeting,” Dick went on, “and that’s really the point. Of course, you can attend the meeting yourself if you want to, there isn’t anything technical about it, electing directors and so on. What I wondered was if you would give me a proxy and let me vote your stock along with mine. That would be simplest.”

Erma sat comfortably sipping black coffee. “If I give you my proxy you’ll vote the whole thing, won’t you?” she asked.

“Of course. I own the other half.”

“How long is a proxy good for?”

“As long as you want to make it. Usually there is no stated term. You can recall it whenever you want to, or make a new one.”

“Then I guess I’ll make a proxy, it sounds important. Only I think it would be piggish for you to vote the whole thing, so I’ll give my proxy to Bill, if he’ll promise not to elect the shepherdess a director.”

You were flustered; you felt yourself blushing.

“Really, Erma,” you protested, “you’re putting me in a false position—”

“I don’t see anything false about it,” she declared. “It seems to me very sensible. You two can run things just as you want to, and two heads are better than one. Anyway, this just happens to appeal to me.”

“You’re a damn fool,” said Dick.

But you really did mean it; she stuck to it, airily but inexorably. You walked all the way home, in the mild September night, feeling alternately humiliated and elated.

But one thing was a fact; at twenty-six, not quite twenty-six, you held the voting power for one-half the stock of a ten-million-dollar corporation. You would be on equal terms with Dick — but even your fancy balked at that. You would scarcely be on even terms with Dick, not if you had a hundred proxies.

VII

He became suddenly aware that his hand was again in his overcoat pocket, closed tightly over the butt of the revolver His hand came out and the revolver with it, and he stood there with his forearm extended, the weapon in plain sight, peering around, downstairs and up, like a villain in a melodrama. If the door of the landing had at that instant opened and one of the art students had appeared, he would probably have pulled the trigger without knowing it.

His hand returned to his pocket and then came out again, empty, and sought the railing as he mounted another step, and then stopped once more.

Oh you would, would you, he said to himself, and he felt his lips twist into a grimace that tried to be a smile. No you don’t, this time you go ahead, if it’s only to point it at her and let her know what you think she’s fit for.

You go ahead...

You said that to yourself, over and over again, that night in Cleveland when Lucy was going away. Go ahead, go ahead, you repeated, what are you waiting for?

But you did neither. You dangled on the peg of your irresolution and cried like a baby.

She had not been back long, it was towards the end of October, when one evening you were dining at Winkler’s Restaurant and she suddenly said:

“It looks as if I’m going to New York soon. Mereczynski has opened a studio there and Mr. Murray says he can get him to take me. I don’t know if I’m worth it; I’ve written Father about it.”

You felt at once that she intended to go, that she would go. You were panic-stricken; not till that moment had you been aware that underneath her simplicity and her quietness was a strength which made her immeasurably your superior. Had you misjudged also your own importance to her?

“How soon would you go?”

“I don’t know, probably a couple of weeks, as soon as Mr. Murray can make the arrangements. If I am to go at all it might as well be at once.”

“In two weeks,” you said, and then were silent. When you spoke again, it was almost desperately.

“I’ve been wanting to ask you to marry me. Of course you know that. If you go to New York that will be the end of it.” You hesitated, then finished more desperately and rapidly: “Unless you’ll promise to marry me before you go.”

But Lucy laughed! And said:

“Well, you did ask me after all.”

“I’ve wanted to since the first day I saw you,” you declared. “I took it for granted you knew. But I’ve never known what to say to you. I don’t know even now how you feel about me—”

She stopped smiling, and her voice was more serious than you had ever heard it:

“I don’t either. I never have known how we feel about each other. I like you so much, much more than I’ve ever liked anyone, but there’s something in you I don’t like, and I don’t know what it is. Though if you’d asked me last summer I’m pretty sure I’d have said yes.”

She was to take a sleeper on a Wednesday night. On the Tuesday evening you dined again at Winkler’s. After dinner you drove her home and, arriving there and observing that it was only ten o’clock, it was suggested that you stay a while. Finding the library and parlor occupied by Aunt Martha and a bridge party, Lucy said you could find refuge in her room, and ran upstairs ahead of you.

She had some snapshots, taken during your summer visit, which you had not yet seen, and you helped her dig them out of the trunk; and she sat cross-legged on the bed, propped against the pillows, while you sat beside her and took the pictures from her one by one. You hardly saw the pictures.

A picture fell from your fingers into her lap. You reached for it together, and your hand closed upon hers. She looked at you, and her eyes widened and her face became suddenly still as marble. You leaned forward and kissed her. You kept your lips on hers, put your arms tight around her.

“My love, O Lucy my love,” you gasped. “Kiss me, please kiss me.”

She was silent, but she kissed you, again and again. She held you close with strong and urgent arms. “My love, my dear love,” you whispered. Awkwardly your rough embrace tightened around her. She shivered, suddenly and violently, withdrew herself, pushed you away.

“I think you tore my dress,” she said, feeling at it.

You swung yourself around, got onto your feet, on the floor, and stood there, betrayed and ridiculous, fumbling in your pocket for your cigarette case. She too got up and without saying anything went to the dressing-table mirror and twisted herself about.

“I’m sorry if I tore it,” you said from across the room.

She came over and stood in front of you, quite close, and put her hands on your shoulders. She tried to smile and you tried to look at her troubled eyes.

“I’m almost crying,” she said. “I can’t figure it out. It’s not the dress, or that I’m afraid of anything we might do. But something was wrong. It was just no good!”

“I’m sorry,” was all you could say. “I’m awfully sorry, Lucy.” As she stood there with her hands still on your shoulders you thought to take her again in your arms, but she moved away and began picking up the scattered pictures.

The following summer you took your vacation early in order to spend two weeks at home while Jane was there. You had of course mentioned Lucy in letters, but at arm’s length, making phrases. Now you spoke of her in detail and with feeling; you gave Jane to understand that it was a case of a grand passion unaccountably thwarted by the tragic vagaries of obscure fate.

“I certainly intended to ask her to marry me,” you declared. “It seemed foreordained. She clearly expected it too. Surely we were made for each other if any two people ever were. And yet it was no go, there was something somewhere that made it impossible. I honestly think I was in love with her — I must have been. Yet somehow unconsciously I must have felt that it wouldn’t work, at least that marriage wouldn’t. Remember she’s a musician, she’s an artist, she has that temperament. Maybe—”

To your shocked surprise Jane laughed. She said suddenly:

“Are you going to marry Erma?”

You were a little startled. “Not that I know of,” you replied. “No, not even if I wanted to, which I don’t. She’s a grand lady, much too grand for me.”

“Not too grand to put you in control of her property.”

You laughed. “I’m not in control of anything. She can recall that piece of paper whenever she wants to, which might be day after tomorrow. No, she’s out of my class.”

“You’ll marry her, you’ll see.”

VIII

“Is that you, Mr. Lewis?”

It was Mrs. Jordan’s voice, from the basement.

Had she then seen him come in? Not necessarily. Perhaps she had heard his footsteps on the stairs; or, since that was unlikely on account of the carpet and the pains he had taken to mount softly, possibly he had knocked the revolver against the rail when he took it out of his pocket or as he put it back.

“Is that you, Mr. Lewis?”

He trembled from head to foot. He turned his head and looked behind him and down, sidewise, looking at nothing, like a treed coon. Well, he thought, use your brain if you’ve got one. Either you answer Mrs. Jordan or you don’t.

It was only three or four steps to the first landing. He suddenly ran up them, quietly and rapidly, trying to make no noise at all. At the top he whirled around the corner, and as he did so, the tail of his overcoat described a wide semi-circle. There was a rattle and a clatter as the little lamp with the parchment shade tumbled to the floor onto the bare wood, beyond the edge of the carpet. It banged against the wall; then silence.

He jumped as if shot. Now he thought, what are you going to do? Are you going to answer her or not?

You might as well.

Calmly, calmly. You were quite calm three nights ago when you told her that it was intolerable, you could stand it no longer, you were being pushed into insanity, and the only way out was to kill either her or yourself or both. Has she told anyone of that threat? You were a fool to threaten her, but she doesn’t talk. If she has mentioned it to anyone that would be fatal. Do you see what thin ice you’re skating on — if she has happened to breathe a word of it, to anyone, no matter who, your goose is cooked. Anyone, the woman at the corner delicatessen, for instance.

They say there are a thousand other ways too that things like this are traced. Through the weapon, for instance. But they’d have a fine time trying to trace the revolver, in case you were suspected.

“Take it along,” Larry had said, when you were starting out for a day’s fishing, one morning on his ranch, the summer you went to Idaho. “You might have some fun popping at jackrabbits or a coyote.”

You tried it a few times, but never hit anything. You chucked the revolver away and forgot all about it; discovered it, to your surprise, when you were unpacking after your return to New York. You meant to write Larry about it, but never did. For four years it has been in that old bag in the closet; certainly no one knew of it, not even Erma.

They’ll try to get you a thousand different ways if they suspect you. They’ll want to know everywhere you went and everything you did. “Where were you, Mr. Sidney, between ten and twelve Thursday night?” Dare you ask Jane to do that? “I was at my sister’s house on Tenth Street; I spent the entire evening with her.” That would fix them. “She was alone, and I spent the entire evening with her.”

As a matter of fact, it might work. You didn’t show any signs of anything at the office; you ate at your usual table at the club, everybody saw you; and when you went home to get the revolver, it was still early not yet nine o’clock. But you’ve got to remember that they’ll ask the servants about every little thing. All right, the servants saw you enter and leave. “What did you go home for?” What did you go home for. The whole thing may hang on that, that shows how ticklish it is. Very well, then, you went home to get something for Jane, something you wanted to take to her — any little thing, like a book for instance. “What was the name of the book?” You’ll have to talk it all over very carefully with Jane, and get every point decided so you won’t contradict each other.

Then you walked away from the house. The doorman saw you walk away, and fortunately you happened to turn south. You’ll say you were in no hurry to get to Jane’s. You just walked a few blocks and then picked up a taxi on the avenue.

It is vital to remember exactly where you actually did go and whether anyone saw you. You didn’t walk on Park Avenue very far; you turned at one of the side streets, somewhere in the Forties, and went over to Broadway, where you turned uptown again. You stayed on Broadway quite a distance, maybe Seventieth Street, then went to Central Park West, and turned west again on Eighty-Fifth. Then you were here, in front of the house, across the street. Almost certainly no one saw you. From the time you left Park Avenue you haven’t spoken to a soul.

But how are you going to get out? You’ll just have to stay until you’re sure no one heard the shot, and then come downstairs and beat it. If you do get away, if you really do get clean away, get to Jane’s house and later go home, it’s even possible that you’ll never be connected with this place at all. Nobody around here knows you except as Mr. Lewis. There’s nothing with your name on it anywhere here, no photographs, no letters—

There’s that damned statute!

William the Conqueror. The masterful man, your true character. The artist revealing what everyone else is too blind to see. Erma would enjoy this. Trapped by that piece of junk! Oh no, not on your life. You can take a hammer and knock it to pieces. You should have done it long ago. You should have done it the evening you went home and found Erma decorating it.

They’ll hunt, they’ll look everywhere.

There’s a lot of numbers on the back of that phone book; they’ll jump on that: Chelsea four three four three. Maybe your own too; you’ve never noticed. That one would be enough — straight to Jane! Tear off the cover and burn it; or erase that number. Then they examine the spot with a microscope, and you might as well have left your card. All right; take the book away; take it home and hide it somewhere.

What are you going to do with the gun? If you could just leave it there, put it down and leave it there — but of course you can’t. Wrap it in a newspaper and leave it on the subway train? Throw it in the river. That’s it! When you get off the subway at Fourteenth Street go straight to a pier and throw it in.

What if they arrest you, how good are you going to act? The thing to do is send for a lawyer and not say anything till he comes. Send for Dick and tell him to bring a lawyer, ask him to bring Stetson, he’s the best of that bunch. What will you tell Stetson? You won’t dare tell him everything; all about the last two years, yes, but not that there’s been any difficulty. Shall you tell him about Grace? What if you don’t, and he finds out and questions her? How much does she know? Then he’ll suspect everything you tell him. You’ve got to be as careful what you say to your own lawyer as if he were after you too. For the Dick part of it, you’ll have to leave it to Dick; you’ll have to see Dick alone first and put it up to him.

You’ve never shot any kind of firearm to amount to anything, except that little twenty-two rifle you used to hunt rabbits with. It was never much fun; you couldn’t bear to get your hands bloody. Red Adams used to string them on his belt by the hind legs, so that his overalls had a ring of sticky blood around the knees. Jane would always help you skin them and hang them up on the back porch to freeze. She’s never been squeamish about anything. If only there’s nobody there with her! If once you get it over, and get out, and get to her house and find her there sitting in the back room reading, as she often is, you’ll be safe. What about the maid? Leave it to her, she’ll attend to it somehow.

Suicide’s a funny thing. You’re afraid to think of it, but once you do think of it there’s nothing to be afraid of. You stand there in the bedroom, in the middle of the room, and put the barrel in your mouth and point it up towards the top of your head, and there’s nothing wrong with you; you can do whatever you damn please, you can take it out again and go and eat your supper. Or you can pull the trigger, just simply press your finger down, that’s all, finish...

She’ll be sitting in that chair, now, when you go in. You will close the door behind you, and deliberately take the revolver from your pocket and take off your scarf and wrap around it. What will she do? She’ll sit and watch you. Will she be startled or frightened, will she cry out or plead with you or otherwise finally admit your existence as a force, needing to be considered? She won’t believe in it. She might, though, she might scream. You don’t know what’s in your face; you are doing something she thinks is not in you, and if your face gives it away she might scream and shout for help. Ah, if she does! You’d like to hear that once. But then you might fail.

All right. Go on up. Go on and get it over with.

You might have known you’d knock that damn lamp off.

IX

He reached down, and quietly and precisely picked up the lamp and set it back in its niche, trying to make the shade hang straight. “Yes, it’s me, Mrs. Jordan,” he called down. “Knocked the lamp off again.”

Her voice came:

“Oh — I thought maybe it was someone to see Miss Boyle. If you break it you’ll have to pay for it.”

A door in the basement opened noisily, then banged shut; Mrs. Jordan had returned to her room. Silence. Still he stood — the idea of movement was hateful — he felt physically exhausted, and completely indifferent to all things. He told himself, you might as well be a dead leaf hanging on a tree...

Do other people feel like this? If they do why do they live? A dead leaf blown in the wind. It isn’t so much the helplessness; you could stand it to feel yourself pushed and pulled, here and there, if only you knew what was doing it and why. You called yourself a weakling and a coward because you let Lucy go, but that was silly.

In November, two years after Lucy had left, Erma suddenly decided to go to Europe. You had never heard from Lucy or written to her. In your room was her photograph; for a long time it stood open on your chiffonier, then, one day, just after you got back from your visit home when you told Jane all about it, you took the photograph down and put it away — in a drawer. It’s probably still around somewhere.

Throughout those two years it was obvious that everyone, including Dick, expected momentarily to hear that you and Erma were engaged. You yourself wouldn’t have been surprised if some morning at breakfast you had found an item on the society page of the Plain Dealer: “Miss Erma Carr announces her engagement to Mr. William Barton Sidney.”

You did in fact find information in the society column one morning, but it was to the effect that Miss Carr would leave shortly for an extended stay abroad. All day at the office you expected to hear from her, and when at five o’clock no word had come you telephoned to Wooton Avenue.

“How long are you going to stay?” you asked.

“A winter, a month, ten years! Why don’t you come over next summer? Meet me’ in Brittany or Norway or somewhere. You ought to have a real vacation anyway. We could stay over there forever, and you could run back once a year to attend the stockholders’ meeting.”

You were puzzled and irritated. Was this a proposal of marriage, or was it a polite hint that she would like to change her business arrangements?

“By the way,” you said, “now that you’re going away maybe you’d prefer to turn your proxy over to Dick. Seriously, I think it would be a good idea. You don’t know how long you’ll be gone, and after all who am I? I’m in an anomalous position. You can be sure that Dick doesn’t relish having a mere employe dressed up like an equal.”

“Has he been nasty?” she asked quickly.

“Lord no. I’m not complaining. It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be much sense in it, and naturally I feel a little ridiculous.”

“You don’t need to. You shouldn’t. As for the proxy, keep it if you please.” She hesitated, then went on, “I didn’t intend to mention it, but the other day Tom Hall insisted that I make a will, and if I fall off an Alp or drink myself to death you’ll be able to celebrate by buying a yacht.”

You’ve always been curious about that will. What exactly did it say? Surely not the whole to you; yet with Erma you can’t tell. There was no one else but Dick, and she wasn’t apt to swell him up. The whole thing! Under certain circumstances, then you could have given Dick something to think about. Was it changed later when she married Pierre? Perhaps, no telling; if so, has it again been changed to you?

It was more than a year before you got a letter from her, a note rather, and then another year to the next. When she got married she didn’t write you about it at all; you learned of it from a letter to Dick.

It is amusing to speculate on the probabilities in Pearl Street if you had not had that proxy in your safe deposit box. Though that’s not fair either; why must you constantly pretend that Dick tried to choke you off?

One day he said to you:

“What do you think of this New York thing? We might as well decide it. I was thinking last night — I say yes, at once. Gustafson says that England alone will place half a billion in six months. If we handle it right, and if those idiots keep on fighting a year or two, there’ll be no limit — hell, anything’s possible. I’m uncomfortable every minute I’m away from those boatloads of easy money. What do you think?”

“I think I’ll go home and pack up,” you laughed.

The next day you went to New York to find offices, and paid a fortune in premiums to vacate leases. Within six weeks the entire organization, sales and administrative, was moved and installed. Exhausted by your labors, you were nevertheless stimulated and refreshed by the interest of the new activities and the new scene. The tempo everywhere was quickened. As for Dick, he plunged into the boiling middle of it, his mouth shut but his eyes open, grabbing with both hands. You reflected that he was making himself and his sister two of the richest persons in America, but certainly it never occurred to him; he was much too busy to think about it.

Then Larry came, was welcomed graciously by Dick, and sent off to the Carrton plant, and you began to feel a solidity in life; you were catching hold of an edge here and there. Above all, one particular edge.

On arriving in New York you had suggested that Jane and Margaret and Rose leave the little flat in Sullivan Street and set up a household for you, in any part of the city they might select. This was your most cherished gesture and the thought of it warmed you for months.

Jane said no. The others were more than willing, but she vetoed it flatly. She said that you might want to get married, and that you should assume no such encumbrance. You protested that you were only thirty-one, and that you wanted never to get married, anyway. No, she wouldn’t do it. You remained in your little two-room suite at the Garwood.

You were a great deal with her, more than at any period before or since. You took her to plays and concerts, subscribed to the opera, and persuaded her to use the accounts you opened at two or three of the stores. You met a lot of her friends — a strange assortment, there were none you ever really liked except young Cruickshanks, then just a boy, writing verses on the back of menus and grandly offering them to the restaurant manager as payment for his meal. You thought Margaret was in love with him. And you liked Victor at first; no use denying it, you thought him agreeable and likable. He seemed to you more normal and balanced than anyone else in that crowd.

One Saturday in May, lunching with Jane downtown, you insisted that she drive with you the following morning to look at a house somewhere north of White Plains which you had been told of by one of the men in the office.

“There are nine rooms, two baths, everything modern, and it’s at the edge of a wood on top of a hill overlooking one of the reservoirs,” you told her. “Sounds like the very thing we want. I think you’d like it.”

“I know I would,” said Jane warmly, too warmly. “It sounds perfect. But it’s impossible. You see, I’m going to be married.”

“I thought... I thought—” you stammered.

You stopped. You couldn’t say that.

“Who is it?”

She smiled. “Victor, of course. You really didn’t know? You must have. I’ve been as silly as a schoolgirl.”

You lost your head and almost made a scene there in the restaurant. You pretended to no power of veto, but by heaven, if you had it you would certainly use it on Victor Knowlton — a half-baked writer and lecturer, coarse-grained, opinionated. You had heard curious tales about him which had amused you at the time, but which, remembered now, convinced you that he was no man to marry your sister.

“No man is expected to be a saint,” you concluded, “but neither should he be a promiscuous pig, if he expects a decent woman to marry him.”

“I don’t think I need defend Victor against the charge of being a promiscuous pig,” said Jane slowly. “That’s a little strong, isn’t it? Anyway it’s his own affair, just as my own checkered past is mine. And from your own standard you must admit it’s decent of him to want to marry me after having had me for nearly a year. Of course it’s true that I’ve argued against it, but now that we’ve decided to have children—”

You stared at her. This couldn’t possibly be your sister, your dear Jane. You wanted to yell at her, shout some insult at her, but you felt suddenly weak, done in, and frightened. Well, it’s all over, that’s that, you told yourself, standing on the narrow Fulton Street sidewalk, after she had parted from you at the restaurant door and hurried off to the subway.

Any man who expects to get anything from a woman is a fool, or if he does it’s just an accident. No matter who she is, she takes what she wants, and a fat lot she cares about you. Erma would agree with you all right; she’s at least honest about it. Mrs. Davis didn’t hurt you any maybe; she used you; what did she give you? A son; a hell of a favor that was, he ate a dozen dinners at your expense and made an ass of you with that joke of a statue — though he may not have meant it — and he’s spent over seven thousand dollars of your money hanging around Paris and Rome.

Lucy — Lucy wasn’t a woman, she was Lucy. It would have been the same with her — no. No! That was like a raindrop that never falls from the cloud — is whirled upward instead, to float above the atmosphere eternally, finding no home.

The most savage and insolent feast though was that of little Millicent, in that room with the afternoon sun lazing at the window, long ago, as she went silently back and forth collecting things from your closet and dresser and piling them on a chair, and finally turned and came towards you...

Abandoned, bitter, with nothing anywhere in reach to hold onto, you were not surprised that the old familiar fantasy returned; you accepted it, and felt her hands again for the first time in many months, the night after Jane left you standing in front of the restaurant.

X

He turned and walked over the strip of dingy carpet to the foot of the second flight of stairs. Above was semidarkness, drifting down almost to the foot of the stairs like a threatening fog. He hesitated before it, dully, enveloped in silence. Nothing could be more ordinary or familiar to him, yet he hesitated, feeling a strange new quality in the dim dreariness.

That was the time to fight it, he told himself, so plainly that he thought it was muttered words, though his lips did not move.

Then you might have beaten it and come free...

Jane had been married nearly a year; you had decided to tolerate Victor, but you saw them infrequently, partly because you felt that Margaret and Rose were trying to use you for a good thing and you didn’t intend to stand for it. Especially Rose. Jane, trying to manage a baby and a job at the same time, was too busy to notice it.

You sat there that night in Erma’s elaborate bedroom, wondering what was up. It was her first big dinner and dance at the house on Riverside Drive, and had been marvelously successful; she could do that sort of thing so easily, almost without thought. But why had she asked you to stay after the mob had left?

The door from her dressing-room opened, and she entered, fresh and charming with no trace of the night’s fatigue, wearing a soft yellow negligee. She stroked your cheek with her hand.

“Poor Bill, you’re tired,” she said.

You were somewhat disconcerted. “Not so very,” you said.

“Neither am I,” she replied, “put your arm around me.”

You held her close, at first mechanically, like a conscientious proxy; then, approaching excitement, on your own account. A strange night that was. Like watching yourself from the top of a mountain, too far away to see clearly...

In the morning it astonished you that she arose when you did and insisted that you have fruit and coffee with her; and there, at the breakfast table, she announced her opinion that it would be a good idea to get married.

“Since we’ve known each other over twelve years,” you said, “that suggestion, at this precise moment, is open to a highly vulgar construction. I can’t think why you propose it.”

“I’m tired of being Veuve Bassot. I want to invest in a husband.”

“At least you’re frank about it.”

“You ask why, and you insist. Perhaps I’m still curious about you, which would be a triumph. Or, maybe, I merely want a screen inside my bedroom door, in case the wind blows it open...”

You lifted your coffee cup, whipped into silence by her smiling brutality; and doubtless you looked whipped, for she pushed back her chair and came around the table and kissed you on top of the head.

“Bill dear, I do Want to be your wife,” she said.

All day long at the office, and the night and day following, you pretended to consider what you were going to do, knowing all the time that it was already decided. You had supposed that she would want a starched and gaudy wedding, but it was in a dark little parsonage parlor somewhere in South Jersey, with Dick and Nina Endicott as witnesses, Erma made her marital investment less than one month later.

It was Larry who introduced Major Barth to you and Erma; brought him out one evening for bridge. There was nothing impressive about him, except his size — almost massive, well-proportioned, with a little blond mustache that looked like a pair of tiny pale commas pasted couchant, pointing outwards, against his youthful pink skin. You would not have noticed him at all, among the crowd, but for the subsequent comedy.

The big handsome major began to be much in evidence, but still you took no notice; Erma’s volatile and brief fancies in the matter of dinner guests and dancing partners were an old story to you. Then, returning home one evening at nearly midnight, on mounting to your rooms on the third floor you saw light through the keyhole as you passed Erma’s room on the floor below, though John had told you that she was out and would not return until late.

In the morning you arose rather later than usual, and you were in the breakfast room with your emptied coffee cup beside you, just ready to fold up the Times and throw it aside, when you heard footsteps at the door and looked up to see Major Barth enter, twinkling and ruddy.

“Good morning,” he said pleasantly; and added something about supposing you had gone to the office and wishing he had one to go to.

It so happened that that evening you and Erma were dining out. As usual she came to your room and tied your cravat.

“Tim interrupted your breakfast, didn’t he?” she smiled.

In front of the mirror, with your back to her, you arranged your coat.

“And is he — that is — are we adopting him?” you inquired.

She was silent. Then she said:

“Sometimes you frighten me, Bill. You feel things too well, much too well for a man. How long have we been married, a year and a half? Yes, eighteen months. We’ve had dozens of house guests, some under rather peculiar circumstances, like the Hungarian boy last winter, and you’ve never lifted an eyelid. But you feel Tim at once; you’re much too clever.”

You were now dressed, and stood by the chair looking down at her, your hands in your pockets. “And after last night I am supposed to breakfast with him and discuss yesterday’s market? Not that I’m pretending any personal torment, but when that jackass walked in on me this morning I felt like an embarrassed worm. What do you want me to do? Shall I go and live at the club? Do you want a divorce?”

“Come on,” said Erma, “we’ll be late.”

It petered out to no conclusion.

It was a few years after that you moved to Park Avenue. You had been married five years!

“I’ve never lived in anything between a hotel room and a house,” said Erma. “The word apartment has always sounded stuffy to me. If we don’t like it we can probably sell without much loss.”

“I think we may scrape along somehow,” you remarked drily, “with nineteen room and eight baths.”

The arrangement was ideal, with your rooms on the upper floor, at the rear; and the night you first slept there you complacently accepted Erma’s suggestion that all knocking should be at your door. It had already been so, in effect, for two years; this merely formalized it.

She must have spent close to half a million furnishing that apartment. More than ten years of your salary. You figured it up with her once, but that was before the hangings had come over from Italy and the pictures and stuff she bought later in London. Why? She hadn’t gone in for the big show after all; there were too many rules to suit her. You never knew who you might find when you went home to dinner — anybody from that French duke with his cross-eyed wife down to some bolshevik professor. A whole tableful. Then for a month at a stretch you’d dine at the club, preferring that to a solitaire meal at home, while she would be off chasing restlessly after something which she never found.

Nor did you; you weren’t even looking for anything. Though you did one evening see something that stopped you and set you staring in the whirling snow. After a too ample dinner at the club you had gone out for a brisk walk in the winter night and, striding along Fifty-seventh Street, were suddenly in front of Carnegie Hall. A name on a poster caught your eye: Lucy Crofts. It was a large poster, and her name was in enormous black letters.

The date was in the following week.

Twelve years ago, you thought, it seems incredible. She’s nearly thirty. Over thirty! Lucy, Lucy! Yes, call her now. If you could get her back as she was — you don’t want much, do you? Let her come in now and run up the stairs to you, and you take her up and introduce her, politely — Lucy, this is—

XI

He was moving up the second flight, into the semi-darkness, slowly and wearily. Involuntarily his left hand went into his trousers pocket and came out holding a ring with two keys on it, and still involuntarily his fingers selected one of the keys and turned it to the correct position for insertion in the keyhole.

He felt the key in his hand and looked down at it, wondering how it had got there...

That evening at the recital the expectation was dead before you saw her. You arrived early, to be sure of not missing Lucy’s entrance, and the two sturdy matrons on your right told each other all you didn’t care to know. One of them had heard her play in Vienna and had later met her in Cannes; the other had known her husband, who had left his estates in Bavaria to be with her on her American tour. Never had there been so devoted a husband, she declared.

And so on.

She was very beautiful, superbly dressed, perfectly composed. The audience loved her at once. You were thrilled for a moment as she stood at ease, graciously inclining her head to the applause; then as she sat down and began to play you felt bored and indifferent. This trained woman playing Mozkowski to a full house — what a place to come to, to find Lucy!

After the first intermission you did not return.

That winter Erma suddenly took it into her head to give Margaret and Rose a lift. She and Jane have always been funny together — in a way they genuinely like each other, but from the first they’ve always backed off a bit, as much as to say, you may be all right but just keep off my grass if you don’t mind. She didn’t get far with Margaret either — Margaret’s a strange kid and a good deal of a fool, thinking she’s in love because Doctor Oehmsen has articles in the American Science Journal.

But Rose jumped at Erma’s first gesture. Erma soon got fed up with her clever tricks, but Rose held on till she got what she wanted.

At first you thought she was after Dick, and maybe she was, but if so she soon found that Mary Bellowes was ahead of her. Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes — it looked very imposing on the announcement, almost as imposing as one of her grand entrances into a drawing-room. Instantly Erma was on to her the first time Dick brought her around.

Later, after they had gone, you told Erma that Dick deserved better, and that as an older sister it was up to her to save him from so unpleasant a fate. She replied that the remark was your record for stupidity.

The wedding was as different as possible from your and Erma’s rustic nuptials; no Jersey parsonage for Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes. You were best man, and when at a solemn moment Erma made a grimace and winked at you, you almost dropped the ring. They took a mansion on Long Island and four or five floors on the Avenue, and for the first time Dick began to take an interest in the private ledger. But even her furious assaults could not greatly disturb the serenity of those colossal columns; and they were restored again to assured security within the year, when Dick declared to you one day at lunch: “Bill, every woman alive ought to be locked up in a little room and fed through a hole in the wall.”

You decided that it was not a propitious moment for sounding him on a proposal that had occurred to you that morning. Only a few weeks previously you had returned from Ohio, from your mother’s funeral, and to your surprise Larry had not only accepted Jane’s invitation to come to New York for a visit, but had apparently settled down for an extended stay, having moved recently from Jane’s house to a couple of rooms on Twelfth Street. He had told you nothing of his intentions, but you thought it possible that five years of Idaho had been enough for him and that he might welcome another chance at the career he had once started so well and abandoned in disgust. You decided to ask Dick whether Larry was wanted and if so on what terms.

The project was temporarily set aside by the sudden appearance from nowhere of Mrs. Davis and your son. Day after day you went directly after lunch to the bare little room overlooking the dirty little West Side street, and sat there while he worked on your bust. You wondered what you would do with the darned thing when it was finished, until one day Paul said:

“The Greenwich Galleries over on Eighth Street would like to have this for a month or so, if you don’t mind; they’re going to have a little show of modern American sculpture.”

“When?”

“Around the first of April.”

It was arranged, with the proviso that your name should appear neither in the catalogue nor on the card. Before the end of March it was finished and delivered; and Paul, with several hundred dollars of your money in his pocket and an account opened for him in a Paris bank, was gone.

No sort of intimacy had developed between you; he was too shrewd and intelligent not to attempt to conceal how utterly you were to him merely a lucky find.

Twice you visited the Eighth Street galleries to see your head and face in marble publicly displayed, and to watch others looking at it, while pretending your attention was elsewhere. Then the confounded idiots, forgetting entirely the careful instructions given them by Paul, that it was to be kept there until you called for it, on the very day the show ended had it delivered to your address on Park Avenue. When you got home from the office there it was in the middle of the big table in the library, with a wreath of ferns and red roses around its brow and a circlet of yellow daisies hanging from its neck.

Erma, having apparently just finished this decorative effort, was seated at the piano. When you entered she crashed into the Polonaise Militaire. You tried to laugh, but it was too much for you. Suddenly she left the piano and came towards you, towards the table.

“I tried to fix it up as nice as I could,” she said, reaching over and pretending to adjust the daisy necklace. “There have already been three men after it for the Hall of Fame, but John and I chased them. Bill dear, it’s marvelous — that indomitable will, that gallant fling of the head — I’ve decided to call it William the Conqueror.”

You turned and left the room, and the house; got a taxi and went to the Club, and spent the night there. But by the following afternoon you felt better about it, especially about Erma. She might be cruel and pitiless, even malicious, but she was right. You went home, and entering, called out:

“Vive William the Conqueror!”

She chose to be semi-serious about it, after you had explained its origin and reason of being and she had poured you a cup of tea.

“Your young sculptor is either very stupid or a first-rate satirist,” she said. “I’m sorry he’s gone; why didn’t you bring him to see me? He made gorgeous fun of you, Bill. It saddens me.”

“There are masterful men,” you observed.

“None with a sense of humor,” she replied. “And, besides, you aren’t masterful at all.”

That evening William the Conqueror was stowed away in a corner of your dressing-room. But you couldn’t resist the impulse to show it to Jane, swearing her first to secrecy. You pulled it out nearer the light and introduced it derisively as William the Conqueror, explaining that it had been christened by Erma. She looked at it from all sides and then sat down on the floor in front of it and looked up at you.

“It’s extremely good,” she said, “but it isn’t you.”

“No? Why not.”

“It’s too—” she hesitated. “It’s too stupid. It’s what you would be like if you went around bumping people off of sidewalks.”

That was the evening of your birthday party — your fortieth birthday — another of Erma’s unlikely gestures. Lord, families are jokes — look at that bunch around that table! Jane, Larry, Margaret, Dick, Victor. Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes Carr was there, too. And Rose...

Rose, you reflected, knew what she was about better than most; she’s the only person you’ve ever seen work Erma successfully, by sheer impudence. She had her way with Margaret too, you learned that evening. Up in your room, after the party. Jane told you she had that morning had a final interview with Mrs. Oehmsen and arranged definitely that the divorce proceedings should be postponed until autumn. October at the earliest. Rose’s wedding was set for the middle of September; so Margaret could be a maid of honor a full month before she became a corespondent; and Rose, off on a European honeymoon, would be three thousand miles from tabloids.

“How did you persuade her?” you asked.

“I told her that if she didn’t promise to wait Margaret would go off to the South Seas, and Dr. Oehmsen would follow her, and she’d lose all her fun.”

You reflected that Rose, whom you actively disliked, was the only member of the family who had got any considerable thing out of you. It was at your wife’s house that she had carried on her campaign and captured her husband. Jane and Margaret, nothing; Larry...

That wound had been reopened, but with less loss of blood. One day at lunch you said to Dick:

“By the way, I’m wondering about Larry. He seems to be hanging on here for no particular reason, and it’s just possible he’s fed up out there and would like to try his hand again at selling a few carloads of bridges. If he should ask me about it I’d like to know what to say. How do you feel about it? Would you want—”

You were stopped by the surprise on Dick’s face. He said:

“I’m buying Idaho and Larry’s going to run it. Hasn’t he told you?”

From the explanation which followed you gathered that shortly after Larry’s arrival in New York he had gone to Dick with an ambitious and carefully formulated proposal for buying an enormous tract of land, practically the entire valley in which his present modest ranch was located, and engaging simultaneously in cattle-raising and dry farming on a large scale. Dick had agreed to furnish over half a million cash capital, and the plans were now almost complete.

You were humiliated and furious. When that night you went to your room to undress, you observed that the maid’s carelessness had left William the Conqueror out of his corner, pushed out away from the wall. There he was with his gallant head facing you, smiling and confident. In a sudden fit of rage you hauled off and gave him a kick, and nearly broke your foot in two.

XII

The voice came faintly from above, through the closed door at the front of the upper hall, not yet within his eyes’ range:

“I can’t give you anything but love, baby,

That’s the only thing I’ve plenty of...”

It was thin and colorless and it could scarcely be called a tune. Not a monotone, rather three or four false and mongrel tones, alternating crazily into a petty and exasperating chaos. There was a long pause, and then it came again:

“Happiness, and I guess...”

It stopped.

He trembled violently, then controlled himself with an effort, and remained motionless. The voice sounded once more, more faintly than before. So, he thought, she isn’t seated, reading. She’s moving around doing something. Can’t hear her footsteps, probably she has on those slippers with the felt soles...

She always sings it like that; she doesn’t know the rest of the words. Except that second baby. Why the hell doesn’t she put that in at least? If you can call it singing. Long ago, back in the old days, long ago, her voice had a thrill in it — maybe it still has — something has, but it can’t be her voice.

It did have, though, that first night you heard it again.

You got to the theatre after the curtain was up, as usual when with Erma. It was the evening before her departure for the Adirondacks. Soon after the curtain fell, at the close of the first act, you heard a voice directly behind you:

“I guess I left my handkerchief in the ladies’ room.”

The effect was curious. You didn’t recognize the voice, it didn’t even occur to you that you had heard it before, but it stirred you amazingly. Not turning your head, you let some question of Erma’s go unanswered and waited breathlessly for it to sound again. A man’s baritone had replied:

“Shall I lend you mine?”

Then the first voice:

“Yes, I guess you’ll have to.”

You turned like lightning and looked rudely, directly into her face, and recognized her at once.

“Maybe the woman found it,” she was saying. “I’ll go back after the second act and see.”

When the curtain fell again you mumbled an excuse to Erma and were out of your seat and at the rear of the orchestra before the lights were on. She came up the aisle on the arm of her escort, a tall thin man in a brown suit, and you stood aside as they passed. Then he went one way and she another, and you darted after her and touched her on the shoulder.

“I beg your pardon, but aren’t you Millicent Moran?” you said.

She turned and looked at you calmly.

“I used to be, but now I’m Mrs. Green,” she replied. You saw by her face that she knew you before her sentence was ended, but characteristically she finished it before she added in slow surprise:

“Why, I remember you.”

“Battling Bill,” you stammered.

“Will Sidney,” she said. “It’s awfully nice to see you again.”

You felt suddenly foolish and uncertain, at a loss what to say, but a wild and profound excitement was racing through you. You hesitated...

“Maybe we could meet some time and talk over old times,” you said. “I have no card with me, but you can find me in the phone book. William B. Sidney.”

“That would be nice,” she agreed.

“And if I could have your address—” She gave you her address and phone number and you planted them firmly in your mind. Then she said goodbye and was off, presumably to the ladies’ room to find the lost handkerchief.

Throughout the last two acts and intermission you were fearful that she might say something to you there in the seats, forcing you to introduce her to Erma and dragging in the escort, who you supposed was Mr. Green.

That night you could not sleep. You recalled how she had looked, standing before you in the theatre: her slim, slightly drooping figure in its plain dark dress, her dull light brown hair, her level slate-colored unblinking eyes, her pale unnoticeable face. You would have said that whatever passion her blood might have held had been washed out long ago.

You finally got to sleep.

She did not write or telephone, and one morning, about a week after Erma’s departure, you called the number and after a prolonged ringing her voice answered, sleepy and muffled.

“I’m sorry if I got you out of bed,” you said.

“Yes,” she replied, “I don’t usually get up till noon.”

Would she have dinner with you? Yes. This evening? Yes. Should you call for her at seven? Yes. You hung up, wondering if she had been too sleepy to know what she was saying.

Those first few times with her you did succeed in dragging forth, gradually and bit by bit, many of the details of the past twenty years. Not that you were especially interested, but there seemed to be nothing else she could talk about at all. She and her mother had gone to Indianapolis, she said, where an uncle lived, and there Mrs. Moran had resumed the profession of washerwoman and continued at it for eight years, until Millicent graduated from high school. On the very day of high school commencement Mrs. Moran took to her bed, and died three weeks later.

“No, I didn’t cry,” said Millicent. “I never have cried but once.”

She wouldn’t say when that was.

She had gone to live with her uncle, and got a job filing papers in a law office. This was not to her liking (too dull, she said!) and she soon gave it up and through her uncle, a floor-walker, got a place at the stocking counter of a large department store. All this was merely preparation for her real career, which began when at the age of twenty-one, three years after her mother’s death, she was offered a position at the cigar-stand of a big hotel — as she said, the swellest hotel in Indianapolis. For four years she stood there peddling cigars and cigarettes to the cosmopolitan world of Indianapolis notables, commercial travelers, visiting lecturers and barber-shop customers, until one day Clarence Green, covering Indiana and Illinois for the Rubbalite Company, a middle-aged widower, asked her to become his wife.

They were married at once, and when shortly afterward he was transferred to eastern territory, came to New York and established themselves in a flat. Here the story became so vague as to be almost incoherent. It appeared that toward the end of the first New York summer she had returned from a week in the country with her friend Grace something-or-other to find the flat bare, stripped of everything except her personal belongings. At some stage or other there was a divorce and an award of alimony amounting to a hundred and fifty dollars a month.

“He’s very prompt with it,” she said. “It’s never been more than four days behind time.”

You were in her room, late at night. She was on the couch against the wall with the two skinny pillows behind her, and you sat in the rickety wicker chair.

“I’ll probably go up to the Adirondacks the end of the week,” you said. “My wife is wondering why I stay down here in this furnace. I haven’t told her I’ve met an old college friend.”

“How long will you be gone?”

“The rest of the summer probably. I don’t usually come back until after Labor Day. Maybe even later.”

“Your wife is very rich, isn’t she?”

You nodded. “I’m worth a good deal more than I ever expected to be but I’m a pauper compared with her. When I remember how I used to cut down on cigarettes so I could buy candy for you—”

“I still like candy,” she said.

“Then I’ll have to bring you some, for old times’ sake. A bushel basketful, just to show off.”

She was silent. You looked at her and saw that her motionless eyes were regarding you steadily, fixedly. “Come here,” she said in a low dead voice, without moving, not moving even her lips, it seemed.

You got up instantly, but without haste, and went and sat on the edge of the couch beside her.

That first night you didn’t stay long; you finally became aware that she was running her hand through your hair and was saying, “It’s so late I guess you’d better go.”

The next day at one you telephoned. She was sorry, she couldn’t see you that evening, she had an engagement. Tomorrow evening, then. No, she was sorry.

“Maybe we could make it Friday,” she said.

Friday evening it was raining and was much cooler, so you gave up your plan for a drive into the country and took her to a theatre instead. You went directly from the theatre to her room on Twenty-second Street. You had decided not to go in, but you went. At two in the morning you were still there, propped against one of the skinny pillows smoking a cigarette.

“I bought a car the other day,” you said. “It will be delivered tomorrow morning. I thought it would be fun for us to drive out of town some of these hot nights.”

She sat munching the chocolates you had brought, with the same old gestures, methodical as some automatic engine of destruction.

“It must have cost a lot of money,” she observed. “I don’t see why we couldn’t use one of your wife’s cars, if she has so many.”

You explained again the risks which a man of your prominence must avoid.

“I couldn’t stay away all night,” she declared. “If I did and Mr. Green found out about it...”

You were glad that her concern for her alimony imposed caution upon her too, but you wished she’d stop calling her husband Mr. Green.

“No, we couldn’t do that,” you agreed. “I meant to drive out in the country for dinner, maybe sometimes have a picnic lunch in the woods somewhere.”

Her eyes closed slightly, as they had a little before, as they have a thousand times since.

“It would be nice to be in the woods with you,” she said. “Last summer I used to go with Mr. Gowan out on Long Island. And Mr. Peft had a boat in the Hudson River — that was two years ago.”

“You know a lot of men, don’t you?”

She chuckled. “Wouldn’t you like to know though,” she said.

“What does Mr. Gowan do?”

“He runs taxicabs. He doesn’t run them himself — he owns thirty-seven of them — the brown ones with a little bird on the door.”

“That’s funny.”

“Why?”

“Oh nothing, only he didn’t look to me like a man who would run a fleet of taxicabs.”

“How do you know what he looks like, you’ve never seen him.”

“Sure I have, that night at the theatre.”

She turned her head; you felt her chin rubbing against your hair; then she bent down and softly bit your ear.

“That wasn’t him,” she said.

“Who was it then?”

She chuckled. “It was Mr. Green.”

Her husband! Of course not. You gave up, exasperated at her petty infantile obscurantism.

It was a week or so later, after you had been out several times in the roadster, that you found courage to speak to her about her clothes. You weren’t sure how she would take it, and you didn’t know what you might be letting yourself in for.

“I’ve never paid much attention to clothes,” she said indifferently. “Even if I had money, it’s so much trouble.”

Later, when you gave her money to buy things herself, underwear and nightgowns, she carefully gave you the exact change the next day, with the cash slips and price tickets in a neat pile, added up. She’s always been straight about money, presumably because she doesn’t care much about it. You might have known better when she handed you that bunk about Dick, though of course that’s not the same thing. Nor the alimony either; there’s no finding out anything she wants to hide; you don’t know to this day whether she actually did get alimony from her husband, nor for that matter whether she was ever married.

Your first suspicion of that came the day up at Briarcliff when you proposed a trip somewhere, and suggested central Pennsylvania as a locality where you would run slight risk of meeting anyone who knew you. When you asked her about that she seemed not at all concerned.

“But not so long ago you were afraid to stay out overnight,” you reminded her.

“Yes. Well... it doesn’t matter.”

“We can stay a week, or two, or a month, just as we like. What say?”

“I think it would be very nice.”

All right; that was settled. From the eminence of the Lodge you looked out across the expanse of woods and meadows to where a strip of the Hudson was flashing in the distant sunshine, and wondered why the devil you were doing this.

You have continued to wonder to this minute.

XIII

Another step or two and his eyes would be on a level with the floor above, and he would be able to see the light in the crack under the door.

He removed his right hand from the rail and thrust it into his overcoat pocket where it closed once more around the butt of the revolver. His other hand, holding the key, rested against the wall; but as he moved up another step and the hand came suddenly into contact with a nail that had been driven into the plaster he jerked it away nervously, and dropped the key, which fell to the edge of the wooden step.

He glanced upwards quickly — had she heard it — of course not — and then stooped and picked up the key, gleaming dully in the dim light.

The voice from the room was no longer heard, but his head seemed more than ever full of voices... it’s you who are the rat... timid, vengeless, actionless...

You’re no good. You’re no good any more for anything. That’s what you told yourself the afternoon you left the office and went to Eighty-fifth Street, the day she moved here. You’re in for it now, you thought, you’ve let this thing ride you into a hole there’s no getting out of.

She was there, moving chairs around and arranging rugs, with a silent concentration that made you laugh in spite of yourself. She changed them back and forth with an intense seriousness that was new to you, while you sat on the divan against the wall, smoking cigarettes and pretending to join in her earnestness. Later you understood that with her when a thing was once placed it was there to stay.

When she agreed, on your return from the Pennsylvania trip, to leave Twenty-second Street and take a place with you as Mr. and Mrs. Lewis, she wanted it to be a furnished flat. It would cost too much, she said, to buy furniture, and would be too much bother. You were pleasantly thrilled, that first time you came up these stairs and opened the door with your key. In a plain clean gingham dress Millicent looked quite domestic, normal, just a woman like any other woman, rather homely to be sure.

“It’s going to be nice here,” she said.

You nodded. “Aren’t you glad we went ahead and bought our own furniture?”

“Yes, it wasn’t as much trouble as I thought it would be. It must have cost a lot of money.”

That was in September — a year ago September. It seems like a hundred.

It was only a few days after you moved in that she said there ought to be more vases and things. In fact you hadn’t bought any bric-a-brac at all except two bronze bowls. The next afternoon you went to a department store and got some candlesticks, and some more vases, and two or three little bronze figures. She tried them here and there and finally got them arranged to her satisfaction.

“It’s very nice,” said Millicent finally, standing in front of you and looking around to view the effect, “but there ought to be something big for the table. A statue or something. I saw one over on Broadway yesterday of some girls, with some bunches of grapes, that was only seven dollars.”

“Ha, a statue!” you exclaimed.

“Yes, for the table.”

“I know the very thing. Beautiful white marble, and just the right size. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

The next day you went to Park Avenue, wrapped a piece of paper around the head, and carried it to a taxi. Half an hour later, panting after the two flights of stairs, you let it down in the middle of the table, removed the paper and invited Millicent to admire.

“It’s very modem, a fine piece of work,” you said. “Its name is William the Conqueror.”

She stood and stared at it solemnly. “It looks like you,” she chuckled. “I think it looks exactly like you.” She turned and looked at you appraisingly. “If you were really like that,” she said, “you wouldn’t be afraid of me.”

Startled and astonished, you exclaimed, “Good lord, I’m not afraid of you!”

“Oh yes you are. You think I’m wicked. All men do, just because I’m not ashamed of anything. That’s why they don’t mind if I’m not pretty.”

“Who told you that? Somebody told you that.”

She dismissed the question with a shake of her head.

She had taken all the flavor out of your irony, and you wished you had left it at home in its corner.

The next evening you came in and up the stairs, and let yourself into the front room, and at the first glance around you sat down on the nearest chair, with your hat and coat still on, stared incredulously, and roared with laughter. How you laughed! Millicent sat in the blue chair, reading, and on the table beside her stood William the Conqueror with a string of little yellow chrysanthemums around his neck!

“No, it’s too damn good!” you choked. “It isn’t possible! Erma darling come and look at it!”

Millicent, unmoved and unsmiling, merely said:

“I don’t think it’s so funny. I think they look nice there.”

You looked at her suspiciously and helplessly; the laughter was gone. But you felt no resentment, it was too vastly comic, even considered as a mere coincidence. Who could be more unlike than the brilliant cynical articulate Erma and this little dumb drab insect? Yet observe the parallel! What hidden centuries of preparation led up to that identical gesture?

When Erma returned from the Adirondacks the daily arrangement of your movements presented a little difficulty. You had always kept yourself pretty well at Erma’s disposal, when she was in town, for bridge, dinners, theatre, opera, concerts, dances. Of course there had been frequent and extended periods when you were, so to speak, on vacation, but their nature made it impractical for you to expect the convenience of a notice in advance. You had a telephone installed at Eighty-fifth Street and told Millicent that whenever possible you would let her know during the afternoon whether you would be able to come for dinner — not that it mattered particularly, since you always went to a restaurant.

Seemingly, she took it all quite cheerfully. You would telephone her from the booth in the cigar store on Broadway, not wanting to call from home or the office:

“I’m sorry, Mil, I can’t make it today or tomorrow, or Thursday either. I’m pretty sure I can Friday.”

“All right,” her voice would come.

“Won’t you miss me?” You would despise yourself for each word as you uttered it.

“Of course I will, but Grace will go to some shows with me. You might send up some more books.”

Before returning to the office you would go across the street to Donaldson’s and order a dozen novels sent, any novels.

The week preceding Christmas was filled with duties which couldn’t very well be avoided. Erma had a lot of new people on the string, and it seemed to you that she was becoming increasingly insistent on your presence and assistance. Certainly she was becoming curious about your tendency to find excuses to be away.

“Just when I begin to think you are at last explored you take on a new mystery,” she said. “You never objected to the Hallermans before. You always were able to tolerate bridge at least twice a week. You are developing a positive distaste for the theatre. Have you found a pretty mistress or are you learning to swim?”

“I already know how to swim,” you laughed.

“Then it’s a mistress!” she exclaimed. “And you took her to Pennsylvania and went berry-picking with her, and by now the only question is whether it will be a boy or a girl. Bravo!”

She came over to you, smiling.

“Please have it a girl, and call it Erma, and I’ll be godmother and give her a million dollars,” she said. “Seriously, Bill, I think it might buck you up to be a father; though,” she added, “I must say that the prospect doesn’t seem to be helping you any — you look more done in than ever.”

You shrugged your shoulders. “I’m worrying for fear it will be twins.”

“Then you aren’t going to tell me?”

“There’s nothing to tell.”

“All right. But you aren’t very amusing lately, you know. It rather frightens me for my old age.”

You went off to the subway, bound for the office; but on arriving downtown you went first to the cigar store and telephoned Millicent. She answered in a sleepy voice; you had got her out of bed, as usual when you phoned in the morning.

“I’m sorry,” you said, “but I can’t make it today or tomorrow. And Wednesday there’s an all-night party at home, and Christmas Day we’re going out to Dick’s place on Long Island.”

“All right,” came her drowsy voice.

“I’m sorry about Christmas — I don’t know what you’ll do, all alone—”

“Oh it will be all right. Perhaps Grace and I will do something.”

Christmas morning, not having got to bed till after five, you turned out sleepily at eleven in response to the summons you had told Allen to give you, and hurriedly bathed and dressed and had orange juice and coffee. You were not expected at Dick’s until three and could drive it easily in two hours. Leaving a message for Erma that you would be back in time to leave at one o’clock, you left the house and took a taxi to Eighty-fifth Street. You hadn’t seen Millicent for three days. This was Christmas Day and she was all alone.

The present was in a large package beside you on the seat; you had been glad to get it out of the house. For Erma had unfortunately seen you bring it home the preceding afternoon; you had evaded her curiosity, which would have been considerably increased had she known that it contained a woman’s fur coat.

You had seen them so rarely in the daytime that the street and house seemed unfamiliar. Asking the taxi-driver to wait, for you expected to stay only a few minutes, and taking the bulky package under your arm, you ran up the stoop and up the two flights of stairs and let yourself in. The room was empty; you glanced around, called, “Hello, Merry Christmas” and, leaving the package on a chair, started for the passage leading to the rear room. You heard nothing, but all at once there she was, in her nightgown and bare feet, confronting you at the entrance to the passage.

“Merry Christmas,” she said, smiling. It was the smile that betrayed her; you had never seen her try so hard to smile. You continued straight ahead, as if to go with her or past her to the bedroom.

“Don’t go in there,” she said, putting out her hand. “Grace is still in bed.”

You grasped her by the arm and brushed past her, took two steps down the passage. From there you could see that there certainly was someone in your bed, against the right wall, hidden under the covers. A shifting of your glance showed you, on the floor at the bed’s foot, a pair of shoes that were assuredly not Grace’s; and, thrown across the chair by the dressing-table, a shirt and a pair of trousers. You took another step forward, then wheeled sharply and returned to the front room.

“If you had telephoned—” she began in a slow and quiet voice.

“Shut up!” you said. You were feeling nothing whatever about her; your sick rage was for your place. The temple, not the priestess, was violated.

The package on the chair caught your eye and you nodded towards it. “That’s a fur coat,” you said, “you’re welcome to it. You’re welcome to everything. I hope I see hell before I see this place again.”

“You should have telephoned,” she said.

XIV

In his overcoat pocket the fingers of his right hand, closed tight around the butt of the revolver, released their hold and tried to straighten themselves out, stretching within the confines of the pocket; then clutched the butt again, tight, tighter. Again the fingers opened, and they felt moist and sticky; he took his hand out and rubbed the palm up and down on his overcoat, several times, then brought it close to his eyes and looked at it; it seemed very white, and the fingers very short, in the dim light. He thrust it back in his pocket, and it stayed there beside the revolver, touching it, without taking hold of it.

You’re afraid, that’s what’s the matter, he told himself. Timid vengeless hell! You’re just plain scared...

And not only because you’re standing here on the stairs with a gun in your pocket, either. You’re always afraid when it comes to doing something. You’re even afraid of words if they’re the kind that make things happen. Bloodless rhetoric. Bunk. “I hope I see hell before I see this place again.” Surely you didn’t think it up all alone?

The next day at the office there was no word from her; you thought there might not ever be any; you hoped not. But you were worried about your clothes and things; and a little after five you left the office and took a taxi straight to Eighty-fifth Street. Held up more than you expected by the traffic, you didn’t get there till a quarter to six and were afraid you might arrive too late to see her go out, but to your relief there was a light in the front windows. You had the taxi stop almost directly across the street, and sat there in its comer, in the dark. Only a few minutes had passed when the light in the windows was extinguished, and a few moments later the street door opened and she came out and down the stoop, alone, and started west toward Broadway. She looked droopy.

As soon as she was out of sight you rapidly crossed the street and ran up the stoop and the stairs and let yourself in. You called out, “Hello, anybody here?” and went to the bedroom. The beds were neatly made; you approached yours and pulled the blankets and coverlet back and saw that the sheets and pillowslip were clean and fresh; and from under the pillow peeped the edge of your folded pajamas.

“The hell you say!” you remarked aloud.

To save time, so as to get in and out as quickly as possible, you had written the note at the office on the typewriter: I’m taking everything I want. The enclosed five hundred is my going away present. I don’t want to hear from you. Goodbye. You glanced in the envelope to make sure the bills were there, then slipped it under her pillow. On the floor you spread the newspaper you had brought along, and hurriedly made a bundle of the few articles you decided to take. Then you took the envelope from under the pillow and added a postscript to the note: You can have William the Conqueror. Let him sleep in the guest bed when there’s room. You put on your hat and coat and gathered the bundle under your arm.

A minute later you were down the stairs and in the cab on your way to Park Avenue.

“Well that’s that,” you said aloud, and repeated it, “That’s that.”

The first call was the next afternoon. “Mrs. Lewis on the telephone.”

“Mrs. — Tell her I’m not in. Gone for the day.”

The following morning she phoned twice.

When a third call came shortly after lunch you decided it wouldn’t do; you took the call.

“Well.”

“Oh — is it you, Will?”

“Yes. What do you want?”

“Why I just want to know if you’re coming tonight—”

“Forget it. And cut out the telephoning.”

“But I have to telephone if you—”

You took the receiver from your ear and with her voice still faintly buzzing in it slowly hung it on the hook. After a minute or two you removed it again and spoke to Mrs. Carroll:

“Please tell the operators that if that Mrs. Lewis calls me again I’m not in. Or a Mrs. Green — Green. At any time. And don’t bother to send me a slip on it.”

Surely that was final enough you thought. That was the way to do it. Erma would say, you should fold your arms and look masterful.

You and Erma spent New Year’s with friends at Dobbs Ferry and the next day you didn’t get back to town in time to go to the office.

The day after that, about the middle of the afternoon, the phone rang and you heard:

“Mrs. Lewis is calling.”

You were momentarily confused and replied, “I thought I told you if she phoned I wasn’t in.”

“No, not on the telephone, Mr. Sidney; she’s here, in the reception room.”

“Oh. Well. Tell her I’m out, gone for the day.”

“Yes, sir.”

So. She was there in the reception room just a few feet away... sitting there... in a minute she’d be gone...

But presently the phone rang again; this time it was your secretary, Miss Malloy, speaking from her little room back of yours.

“That woman, Mrs. Lewis, told Miss Dietrich in the reception room that she saw you come up in the elevator and knows you’re here and that she’s going to wait till you see her.”

“Yes. Thank you. All right.”

You were going over some figures with two accountants at the time. It dragged along for another hour. When at length they had gathered up their papers and departed you pressed the buzzer, and Miss Malloy came in at once.

“I have to ask a favor of you,” you said. “Will you please go to the reception room and tell Mrs. Lewis I will not see her, now or at any other time, and escort her to the elevator.”

“If she won’t go?”

“She will. Don’t make a scene. Just tell her that.”

“Yes, sir.”

Matter of fact and business-like, with no sign of a knowing look in her intelligent brown eyes, she went. Almost immediately the door opened again and she reappeared.

“She is talking to Mr. Carr,” Miss Malloy said, “so I thought I’d better wait.”

“What! To Mr. Carr!”

“Yes, sir. They are sitting on one of the settees, talking.”

“The dirty little — I beg your pardon.”

“Yes, sir,” Miss Malloy smiled.

You walked to the window, and to your desk and sat down, and then got up and went to the window again. Finally you turned to her:

“Please tell Miss Dietrich to send Mrs. Lewis in here as soon as she gets through with Mr. Carr.”

“Yes, sir.” She went to her room.

Many minutes passed; were they going to talk all afternoon? On the phone you asked Miss Malloy if she had delivered the message to Miss Dietrich. Yes, she had done so at once. At that moment the door opened and Millicent entered; from without the blue uniformed arm of the attendant silently closed the door behind her. She came directly across to where you sat at the desk.

“You made me wait a long time,” she said.

For a moment you gazed at her speechless, helpless. Then suddenly your temples contracted and you savagely demanded:

“What did you tell Dick?”

“I didn’t tell him anything,” she replied.

“You were talking to him for an hour.”

“Why no, I don’t think so. Only a few minutes. I was sitting there and he came through and I saw him glance at me and I stopped him and said, pardon me, aren’t you the Mule? He guessed who I was right away.”

So that was it, an accident. Fine piece of luck. He didn’t pass through that room more than once or twice a day. Was she lying? You could find out.

“So he sat down and we talked about old times. I don’t think he’s changed a bit. He’s very handsome.”

“What did you tell him you were here for?”

She chuckled. “I told him I was having a hard time, and I happened to meet you and I thought you were going to help me out.”

“If you need some money, anything within reason, you can have it.”

“I don’t want any money.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Well, of course I’ve got to have a little money. I’ve got to have something to live on.” She paused. “We ought to have a long talk about it.”

“What about your alimony?”

“He’s quit paying it.”

“How much do you need?”

“We ought to have a talk,” she repeated. “Can you come uptown tonight?”

“No. Not tonight or any other night.”

She raised her shoulders and dropped them; deep in her eyes you saw a momentary flash like a point of white fire.

“You’d better come,” she said quietly. “You might as well come — you know you’re going to come.” She added in a tone of deadly finality that overwhelmed you: “What’s the use of fighting about it?”

What had she really told Dick? you asked yourself. If you did go up there... well, there was no way out of it. If you didn’t go, what would she do?

“I’ll be up after dinner,” you said. “Around nine.”

You had said you would be there around nine; it was a quarter to when you dismissed the taxi and started up the stoop. There was no plan in your head; you were floundering in a jelly of indecision.

In the blue chair, under the reading-lamp, she sat. It was your first view of the blazing purple cheap velvet negligee, with the white ostrich feathers around the neck and cuffs and down the front hems, the dark brown felt slippers.

“Why don’t you let me alone, Mil?”

She returned your look without replying, and you went on, “Having a man here was stupid and indecent, but it’s not only that. I was ready to quit anyway. We’ve never really cared for each other. So why don’t you let me alone? If it’s more money why don’t you be honest enough to say so—”

“I don’t want any money,” she said.

“You said you did at the office. You said you had to have something to live on.”

“Well, I was just trying to scare you.”

“Then what do you want?”

She chuckled. “You’re very funny, Will. I’m sorry about that man — truly it was the first time anyone was ever here and he said it was Christmas Day and he didn’t want to go home and Grace was out in Jersey to her aunt’s. He’s no good anyway. It was Mr. Martin — don’t you remember, he sells insurance, I told you about him one day.”

“I don’t care who he was. You haven’t answered my question: what do you want?”

In a new tone she said all at once, in a breath:

“I want my big brother.”

Startled, you looked at her, uncomprehending; then in a sudden swift flash you remembered that she had said to you one day, long ago in your room at college, “Most of the time we’re just like a brother and sister. You’re my big brother.”

You meant to say ironically, “So you’re in love with me,” but the words wouldn’t come, they seemed too absurd and incongruous. Instead you said, “So it’s me you want?”

She nodded. “And it’s me you want.” She said it not as a challenge or a claim; she just said it, calmly, a fact.

“Like hell I do!” you shouted. “Listen, Mil, we may as well be frank. I can’t stand you any more. Now I’m done. I was done before I found that man here; you were driving me crazy. I was getting so that when you touched me, it made my flesh creep.” You tried to keep your voice calm, but gradually it had raised until you ended with a shout, “I’m done, do you hear! I’m done!”

She gazed up at you, steadily, without saying anything, and again you shouted, shouted that you had never wanted her. You bellowed at her, pacing up and down the room. At last you stopped.

Her voice was quite steady, with all its usual thin dullness:

“You’ve said some awful things.”

“Well... I’ve felt some awful things.”

“It’s not me that’s awful.”

“Oh yes it is. It’s both of us.”

She shook her head. “You’re just afraid. I don’t mind what you say. I know you can’t ever really leave me, I know how you act, I know what you think.” The deep, veiled flash came and went in her eyes. “I know how you feel, too, when—” She chuckled, and added, “Big brother!”

XV

Only two or three steps from the top, he could see, ill-defined in the dim light, his own door at the end of the hall.

There was a soft yellow glow through the shade which covered the small, single electric light. Standing quietly, he could hear from the kitchenette the recurrent faint plop of a single drop of water from the leaky faucet into the sink, a full two seconds’ interval between; and somewhere from outside came the yowl of a wandering cat.

Plop... plop...

In the morning, when you were ready to leave she was still sound asleep.

You were not long in suspense about Dick, for the afternoon of that same day he suddenly said:

“By the way, what about our old college friend? Did you see her yesterday?”

“Yes, she said she’d seen you,” you replied prepared.

“Did she tell you that cock and bull story about her husband?”

“Why... yes... she’s been married.”

“Married hell! Did you fall for it?”

“Sure.” You managed a grin. “I’d fall for anything.”

“Funny.” He turned back from the door. “I’d better be careful though, you smashed me over her. Remember? Battling Bill.” He laughed. “Funny woman — homely as hell and yet, she has a look in her eyes that makes you curious. You’d better look out, Bill. What does she want?”

“Money, of course.”

“Sure, but how much? You’d better be careful how you give it to her. Do you want me in on it?”

You could read Dick like an open book; it appeared certain that he suspected nothing beyond a compassionate gesture to a woman in trouble, for old times’ sake.

A year ago, almost; yes, actually nearly twelve months of hours and minutes since that night, each day confronted with the next, an ordeal not to be tolerated. “It wasn’t very nice of me to have Mr. Martin here,” she said that night, “I won’t do that any more.” So utterly weary that the force of gravity itself seemed overpowering and irritating, you were relaxed, a dead weight, in the leather chair. Whereas formerly you had shrunk only from her, only in her had felt an alienness and a threat, henceforth all was foreign, each thing there was an enemy.

Erma was too preoccupied with herself to take much notice of you, and when she suddenly decided to go to Florida, around the last of January, it was at first a great relief. But soon you were considering that the important thing was to get rid of time somehow, even disagreeably, and wishing her back again.

You moved to the club, and still you seldom went to Eighty-fifth Street. And you never went without phoning in advance, and you never phoned without a feeling of unreality, a feeling that you were doing something too implausible to be believed in. Put to the torture, you could not have answered the question, why do you do this? She was homely, vulgar, illiterate. She was false and treacherous. She was evil. That’s why! She is evil, and you get a kick out of it. No. You get revulsion, disgust, hatred. Bitter and burning hatred. But you have harbored her for twenty years.

She always seemed to be afraid of words; she wouldn’t even answer questions if she could help it. Like the day you asked her about Dick. That was in late spring, around the middle of May. Erma had returned from Florida and was talking of going to Scotland for the summer, and wanted you to go along. You and she had dined with friends and, allured by the mild May air, she had suggested a walk. As you were crossing the avenue at Fifty-seventh you got caught in the center and stood there at the edge of the solid slow-moving traffic, glancing carelessly at the cars as they crept past; and suddenly your careless glance became a stare as you saw Dick and Millicent side by side in a taxicab not ten feet away. They were looking the other way and obviously had not seen you, nor had Erma seen them.

“How far are we?” said Erma. “I’m getting tired. Come along to Scotland and we’ll ride around on ponies — we’re too old to walk.”

You were conscious of no particular emotion, except curiosity. It was not conceivable that Dick — and yet he had married Mary Alaire Carew Bellowes. This was rich— Oh this was juicy!

The next day was Saturday and Dick didn’t come in. In the evening you went to Eighty-fifth Street early, before dinner, and after you had glanced through the evening paper you found an opportunity to say casually, with your eye on her face:

“Have you seen Dick since that day at the office?”

She displayed not the slightest change of expression.

“Dick? You mean Mr. Carr?”

“Yes, I mean Dick Carr. Have you seen him?”

“Why yes, we saw him that evening at the theatre, don’t you remember?”

“No. It wasn’t me. You were probably with Mr. Peft or Mr. Gowan or Mr. Rockefeller.”

She chuckled. “I remember now, it was Grace. She thought he was very good-looking.”

“Well, have you seen him since? — Oh what’s the use. I just wondered how you would handle it. I saw you and Dick in a taxicab on Fifth Avenue last evening. I suppose you were on your way here?” you sneered, trying not to.

She was standing the way she so often does, her arms hanging at her sides, her head languidly erect. “I’m sorry you saw us,” she said. “I didn’t want you to know until it was all done.”

“Really!” You put the paper down and stared at her. “Really!”

“I think he is going to give me a lot of money,” she went on. “I’ve only seen him twice, and we don’t do anything you wouldn’t like. Even if I would he wouldn’t want to. He said he wouldn’t. He used to give me money a long time ago — when I knew you. He’s just sorry for me, and he’s so rich...”

“I thought you didn’t care for money.”

“I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t want money from you. I’d take all I could get from him. I think he’s going to give me one hundred thousand dollars. He says I could live on the interest.”

“Where were you going last night?”

“We ate dinner at a restaurant downtown to talk it over, and he was bringing me home. He didn’t come upstairs though.”

“What restaurant?”

“Why, I didn’t notice. He took me.”

“Where did you meet him?”

“At the corner of Broadway and Fulton Street.”

You got to your feet, shoved your hands into your pockets, and walked to the window and back again.

“I don’t believe a word of it,” you said.

She didn’t reply; but after a long pause, seeing that you weren’t going to speak again, she said, “It’s all true. I wouldn’t lie to you about Mr. Carr.”

Always before that, in your occasional conversations about him, she had called him Dick.

Of course, you got nothing more out of her. Late that night, walking home, as you often did, you considered the amazing fact that, while you might not have been greatly affected by an admission from her that Dick was sharing her favors with you, you were furiously humiliated by the idea of his making a princely gift that would mean financial independence for her.

Did you know that Dick had been here, in the apartment? No, you don’t know it even now for a certainty, though for a while you thought you did, that evening you found the inscription on the statue. That was June, late in June, just before Erma sailed for Scotland. You had been here before dinner, and for an hour or two afterward, before you noticed it; you saw it when you went over to take a book from the table. There it was, printed in big black sprawling letters on the rough unpolished marble of the column: BATTLING BILL.

“Who did that?” you demanded.

“I did, this morning, I just happened to think of it,” she replied.

You approached her chair. “Why?”

“One of the girls downstairs that’s studying art gave me the crayon. She said it was art crayon. I guess that’s what made me think of it, I wanted to use it on something.”

Still you thought it must have been Dick; she didn’t have wit enough. Was it Dick, had he been here? Probably; but just as probably not. There’s no telling—

With that trivial episode something seemed to break. You knew you must do something. Finally and inescapably you must do something. Go to Scotland with Erma? Huh! Go to Paul, in Rome; he was your son, tell him so; what was a son for? Bury yourself in his life — sure. It didn’t take long to dispose of that.

All right, but you must do something...

You were afraid to tell Millicent you were going to leave her and never see her again, afraid of the unconcerned disbelief you knew you would see in her face. You told her merely that you were going away alone and didn’t know when you would be back, but she must have remarked that your manner of saying it was odd. When you told Dick, briefly, that you needed a change and were leaving for an indefinite period he didn’t seem surprised, but was considerably concerned; and you didn’t even write to Jane, who was at the seashore with the children. Even if you had wanted to you couldn’t have replied definitely to Dick’s anxious questions, for beyond the first step you had no plans.

One evening around the middle of July you went to the Pennsylvania Station and got on a westbound train. You were running away, a beaten coward, but that didn’t trouble you. Where you going and what were you going to do? You were going — from nothing into nothing. You were running away from what would never be left behind — it was there with you, tenaciously and eternally; it was buried in your heart, in your flesh and bones.

There was no imaginable way out. You sat there in the train, ashamed and afraid, wondering in sober earnest if you were going mad.

XVI

The cat yowled again, and in the silence that followed he heard again the plop of the water dropping into the sink, as he stood in the middle of the hall under the dim wall light. Through force of habit rather than necessity he stood close under the light and looked at the key in his hand to make sure that it was the one with the two large teeth at the end, the other was for the street door downstairs. A sound came from the front room, the muffled sound of a chair being dragged across a rug; and he thought, she’s pulling it closer to the table, to read; that’s good, she’ll be sitting down.

He thought, what do you mean that’s good. What’s the difference? Go on in...

Go on in. Yes, she’ll be sitting down, and you’ll take off your coat and hat, and she’ll say, “You’re late, did you remember to bring some candy?” and you won’t answer, you’ll stand and look at her and presently say, “Mil, this time I’m going to get the truth out of you.”

In a vague sort of way that’s what you thought you’d say, and didn’t, the night you returned from your flight. She was there, alone, in the purple negligee, sewing on buttons and drinking lemonade.

“Hello,” she said, “you should have sent me a telegram, I might not have been here.”

That was two months ago, two months to a day. By the following morning nothing seemed to have changed; instead of ten weeks you might have been gone overnight. Yet there was a change. You couldn’t have put it into words, not indeed feeling it, except as a vague sense of a concluded fate. Hope was gone, and with it irony.

Another winter; in a month it will be Christmas again. You’d better get her another fur coat and bring it Christmas morning. You will at that. If you’re here. Erma says you look like hell and that you’ve got a disposition like the camel she rode that time at Ghardaia. She says you ought to go abroad for a year. Why not? Dick has mentioned it too, three or four times, though he seems to be embarrassed about it. Is he trying to get you out of the way? Not likely; that’s not like him. You should ask him about it, straight, and then you’d know; you should have asked him this morning, when he came in your office and then didn’t seem to know what he’d come for. He said something about Jane’s good judgment. Does Jane know?

If not Dick, why couldn’t you ask Jane? Does it matter so much? But you must know if they know. You’re not going on like this, like a helpless imbecile, with them discussing you behind your back, trying to decide what they’d better do about you...

Exactly what did she say? Did she say she had seen Jane? Yes. Night before last — seems a year ago. You came up after dinner, rather early, and she wasn’t back yet. There was a telephone call you had to make, and as you sat waiting for an answer, with the phone book lying upside down on the table, in front of you, you noted indifferently the chaos of numbers scribbled in pencil all over the cover; it was a habit of Millicent’s that had at one time amused you; and suddenly you saw among that chaos a number that riveted your attention: Chelsea 4343. You hung up the receiver and grabbed up the book and looked at it closely; of course you hadn’t put that number there; but it was quite plain, unmistakable, Chelsea 4343.

It was half an hour before you heard her key in the door. You waited till she had got her hat and coat put away, and then held the book in front of her.

“Did you put that there?”

She looked at it without replying. “Look here,” you said, “if ever you told the truth you’d better tell it now. Did you write that number there?”

She nodded. “Yes, I remember now, I wrote it one day—”

“Whose number is it?”

She didn’t glance at it again; she looked steadily at you, and finally shook her head, “I don’t remember.”

“You might as well sit down, we’re going to have this out,” you said, and took a chair in front of hers, close to her. “You’d better be careful what you tell me, because this is something I can check up on. I want to know when you telephoned my sister Jane, and what for.”

“I really had forgotten it was your sister’s number,” she said.

“All right. Go on.”

It took an hour to get it out of her, and before she was through she had told it a dozen different ways. Was Erma in it? Sometimes she was and sometimes she wasn’t; anyway she hadn’t seen her. At first she said she’d seen Jane twice and then she said only once. It was mostly Dick. As long ago as last spring, Dick had sent for her and offered her fifty thousand dollars if she would let you alone, go away somewhere, and not let you know where she was. When she wouldn’t take it he had doubled his offer. This fall, just recently, he had been after her again; this time when she refused the money he threatened her. Then Jane came, and begged her.

“She begged me all afternoon,” she said. She took a day to think about it, and she put that number there only a week ago, when she phoned Jane that she had decided not to go.

At first you believed it. After you had got all you could out of her and tried to piece it together and decide how much of it was true and how much she had invented, you put on your hat and coat and started for Tenth Street. She didn’t ask where you were going or whether you’d be back; she just sat there, solemn, quietly watching you. Probably two minutes after you left she was reading a book. You never got to Jane’s house; you walked past it, but you didn’t go in. You couldn’t decide what to say.

And then, yesterday, like a coward you didn’t go to the office at all. You packed trunks! And you found the revolver and sat on the edge of the bed for an hour, holding it in your hand and looking at it, as if that was going to put muscles in your insides.

Last night Millicent was surprised to see you. Of course, you hadn’t telephoned, but she was surprised more than that; you could tell by the way she looked at you, though she didn’t say anything. You told her you hadn’t asked Jane and Dick about it, but you were going to, and if you found she’d been lying you’d make her pay for it. She said you wouldn’t ask them. She said it as if it didn’t make any difference one way or the other, “You won’t ask them about it.” Then she said, with no change at all in her voice:

“Anyway, I made it all up.”

And at the end, after all that, after you’d made a whining fool of yourself, she actually thought she could touch you. Her eyes looked like that, not really starting to close, just ready to, tightened up a little. A thousand times you’ve seen them like that. Then they do begin to close, and her lips get straight and thin and very quiet, and her eyes get narrower and tighter...

There goes her chair again, pulled across the rug. Now would have been the time, now that you know she’s sitting down. Go across to the windows and pull down the shades. You pitiful paltry coward. Last night it sounded like she was telling the truth. If she wasn’t, if Dick and Jane — begging her — no matter. What do they matter? If they came up the stairs right now and all three of you went in together — ha, that would be the way to do it. Erma too, the whole damn outfit. You could sit in a corner and listen to them, and they could keep it up all night and all day tomorrow, and forever, and they wouldn’t get anywhere. Begging her.

Oh cut it out. Cut it out! Steady...

Steady...

XVII

He turned the key in the lock and opened the door; and, entering, quietly closed the door behind him. Millicent, with a magazine in her hand and a box of candy in her lap, was in the blue chair, close to the table, under the reading-lamp. That’s funny, he thought, the blinds are already down, she must be getting modest.

“You’re late,” said she from her chair. “You didn’t telephone, so I nearly went to a show. Take off your hat and stay a while.”

Then, as his left hand went into his trousers pocket and out again, returning the key, and as his other hand suddenly left his overcoat pocket and hung at his side, she said in the same even tone:

“What have you got there?”

His right hand lifted, and a tremor ran through him from head to foot as he realized that the revolver was in it. He was watching her face; he had not said a word; but now he spoke:

“What does it look like, huh? What does it look like, Mil?”

At the same moment he was saying to himself, be careful, why did you take it out, you don’t know what you’re doing, what’s the matter with you? And also, he was going towards her. He stood in front of her chair, almost touching her.

“Are you trying to scare me?” she said, her eyes level and unwavering.

He said, “You don’t think I’ll shoot, do you?”

“Yes, I think you might.” Without letting her eyes leave his face, she moved her hand to indicate the marble head, glistening white, on the table beside her, and added slowly, “Why don’t you shoot Battling Bill? You hate him so.”

He moved his eyes to look at it, and then, without replying, but with a senseless vast relief surging through him, he deliberately pointed the revolver at the thing and pulled the trigger. There was a deafening report; the statue faintly tilted and came to rest again with its nose splintered off; the revolver fell from his hand and clattered to the floor. Like a flash Millicent stooped and then was erect on her feet beside him, the revolver in her hand. She looked at him and chuckled; and hearing her chuckle and seeing the gun in her hand he suddenly smashed his fist hard into her face; she staggered against the chair with a little cry, and he hit her again, and she fell to the floor; and then, with a swift and terrible precision, he reached over and seized the heavy statue as if it had been made of cork and, lifting it high above him, hurled it upon her head as she lay there at his feet. There was a cracking sound like the breaking of a brittle board; and the statue, spattered with blood, rolled gently onto the rug and came to rest there with its broken nose pointing to the ceiling.

He stooped and picked up the revolver from the floor and stood there an instant with it in his hand, then suddenly darted for the door; and as he opened it, he heard Mrs. Jordan’s clumsy steps starting rapidly up the stairs, and her voice: “Mr. Lewis, was that you? What is it?” He stepped back and stood there two paces from the open door, the revolver still in his hand, unable to speak or move; he caught a glimpse of Mrs. Jordan’s face in the dim stairway, heard her scream, and heard her clattering downstairs again and yelling, “Police! Help, police!”

He slowly lifted his hand and looked at the revolver — inquiringly, as if it could tell him something he wanted to know; then with a violent convulsive shudder he relaxed his fingers and it fell. He rushed to the hall, to the head of the stairs, but hearing voices below returned to the room; and, not looking at what lay beside the statue on the floor, went to the window and raised it and leaned out. He heard shouts and, in the dim light from the street lamps, saw forms of people moving swiftly. He closed the window and deliberately and precisely pulled down the shade; then he turned and walked rapidly to the little table in the corner where the telephone stood, and lifted the instrument and took off the receiver and put it to his ear.

The sound of voices, and of heavy and hurried footsteps on the stairs, came through the open door as he said into the mouthpiece:

“Chelsea four three four three.”

Content

Rex Stout
How Like a God

I

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VIII

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XII

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XVII